When does the future start?

Forecasting Futures – Week 2

This introduction to forecasting futures opened with the idea we have of the future and how we define the future. The main focus was on how our perception has changed and evolved along with civilisation and our views on the future today.

The theme of time appears frequently throughout ancient history. The early utopian thoughts focused more on the future being an alternate reality rather than a more developed version of the same reality. Therefore suggesting the same time but a different place. However by the end of the 18th century, people’s perception of the future changed as they began to picture a more advanced version of their reality, Same place but a different time. This made me start to question how one would define time. Is it a matter of opinion and views or can it be defined and measured by unit?

Early civilisation started to use various events and changes in nature to mark and measure the change in time. For example, the change in light throughout a day and the movement of the moon. Over longer time frames they also started to notice and record changes in tide heights and weather patterns, eventually leading to the creation of seasons. From this new information, civilisation was able to create the calendar. Perhaps the most famous example being the calendar created by the Mayan’s, a complex system of calendars that claimed to also be able to predict future events as well as the highly speculated ‘doomsday’ which appears throughout history and religion in many different shapes and forms.

“When does the future begin?”

During the lecture, we began to think about how we measure time and our perception of the future. We were all asked the question “when does the future start?” To me, this was a very simple question, as for me the future includes anything that is about to happen, this could be from the next five minutes down to the next millisecond. I also see anything that has just happened, down to the last millisecond, to be in the past. A constantly moving a very precise linear system.To my surprise, people’s view of the future was significantly different, with some seeing the future in blocks of time such as activities that are taking place that day. Some of my fellow peers also viewed the future being the next five to ten years.

After this insight we took part in a workshop, in which we were required to produce our own visual representation of time, a timeline. However this did not have to be in a linear form like many timelines. I processed my perceptions of the future and created the following diagram.

 

Presentation on Essay Title

Presentation

‘How does the Simulated Space and/or a Non-Space space alter our identity?’

This essay question appealed to me instantly as it was very similar to the Genius loci project we were doing in studio. The concept of spaces and non-spaces is a familiar subject and is one of the more abstract questions. The reading list and textual examples that Greta gave us stood out to me and instantly gained my interest. I am eager to explore this topic further.

I need to ensure that I answer the question given, to do this I will make sure I focus on how the spaces alter our identity looking at the effect they have rather than defining them. I will be looking at textual examples given by Greta and also finding some of my own taking the subject into my own hands and exploring outside of the examples given.

After completing the last studio project I am hoping to gain further insight into the conceptual. This will enable my work in the future will be more conceptually based and contain more substance and depth.

Alongside the examples given to us by Greta I started to think about some other concepts and texts I could investigate to help me answer this essay question. The world of gaming came to mind instantly, RPG games focus on transporting the player to a simulated space. Games such as SecondLife take this concept to the extreme.

Jean B, Dystopian concept of what is real or not. I want to delve deeper into the concept of a dystopian reality, looking at different views of dystopia and how it contrasts with reality as well as the idea of utopia.

Left Brain, Right Brain, Right Shame – Harriet Edwards

After a Fashion – Dene October

‘First Things First’ – Adriana Asler

Taking themes and examples from the presentation rather than recording it.

Title of a design manifesto ‘first things first’

Priorities and ethics in design, questioning the social purpose of design and the social responsibility of the designer.

Stuart Newman – TEXT

Design emerged at the beginning of the industrial revolution (end of the 19th century)

Arts and crafts movement (Britain in the 1980’s) Agustus Putin, William Morris. They were worried about items of mass production are low in quality.

Taking the design back to skill and craft and moving it away from just purely financial gain, creating something that the public needs and desires, fulfil it’s uses. Producing for a society where everyone is equal.

• Industrial modernism -> Bauhaus, they weren’t convinced that the industrial revolution by it’s self was a positive thing. Experimenting with new production techniques and materials (all with an underline ethos of making society a better place [Form follows function] no point in making something that looks pretty if it has no function.
• Destroying the stigma that good design and ‘designer products’ were only available to the wealthy.

Design should be an agent to social change. “Design held the fait of civilisation in it’s hands”

Governments employing designers to promote war and assist in propaganda. Army posters and ‘I Want YOU for U.S army’ poster.

Designers were, at this point, were working with physiologists to use methods to appeal to the audience, merging the methods used for advertising products and promoting war. Surely ethically wrong?

• Links in to architects and designers working with people like Hitler

“Art for us us an occasion…” Hugo Ball

John Heartfield – Whoever reads Bourgeois Newspapers…becomes blind and deaf

[Image of a portrait where the face is covered with news print and text]

He created imagery and design to highlight the corrupt nature of imagery and design at that time. Using counter propaganda. Nazis, closed the Bauhaus, immigrated to the U.S. The design was welcomed by america but the ideology of social change and improving society was lost.

Paul Rand [good example]

Ken Garland – First things first (published in design publication) manifesto.

Seen as highlighting the exploitation of designers, the skills of designers could be used better to assist design for society, rather than just advertising, wasting their skills to flog products.

Design activists e.g Gran Fury – designers started creating more socially aware content, using their skills to put major social issues at question (Aids poster). Barbara Kruger images. Our culture has become associated with consumption and consumerism.

No Logo – Naomi Klein, 1999

Culture Jam – Kaile Lasn.

Culture jamming, disrupting and intervening in the advertising. ‘Un-cooling the million dollar brands.  BP, tried to re brand their logo and their ideology but green peace, created an image of the logo dripping with oil.

Would you sign the manifesto and why? If you were to create a manifesto what would you include in it.

Open to email about an essay question.

After a Fashion: Kays Catalouge, Modernism & Fashion Persuasion – Dean October

‘Typography & Communication’ – John Patrick

The seventh lecture in this series ‘Typography & Communication’ opened with the question; “What is typography?“. The passage shown below by Peter Bil’ak looks at the current definitions of the word typography and how they have been forced to change with the introduction of new production methods. The definition

‘Why am I teaching a course called “wasting time on the internet”

An article by Kenneth Goldsmith

Analysing the ‘featured image’ by Rachel Levit: Classroom setting suggests they are being taught how to waste their time. The location of the image based in the sky adds an abstract and surreal feel to the image, as well as implying a certain amount of freedom paralleled with constraint, with learning being confined to being sat in front of a laptop. All this information I have been able to extract before reading the text. This starts to put the text in to an understandable context for me, allowing me to immerse myself fully

Andrew Slatter states “in oder to write well, you need to read”

The article opening with the words ‘The Surrealists” immediately contextualises the content of the article. Focusing of the concept of dream culture. It explores the ‘electronic collective unconscious’ and the state in which people are half awake and half asleep. The one sentence that resonated with me was where Goldsmith states “The vast amount of the Web’s Language is perfect raw material for literature”. It triggered my thinking about the concept of these classes that are run and whether once people are made to think about browsing the internet, they then are forced to browse it in a specific way. This contrasts from the behaviour seen by people when browsing the web in a sub-consious manner, out of boredom.

‘Wasting Time On The Internet’ – Andrea Mason

Today’s lecture, titled ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’ focused on a notion that no new content is created, but instead existing content is deconstructed, re-created and re-animated. Kenneth Goldsmith suggests that in the current age we have enough already existing tools to create new material. Essentially this means that designers take a concept and/or content and reconstruct it to create something ‘new’.

Andrea used the French word ‘detournment’ which translates to english as rerouting or highjacking to explain this idea. Taking everyday objects and using them, or presenting them differently to portray a different message in a good example. Andrea used the Dada poetry art movement to express this idea. Some of the methodologies behind this visual cut-up theory of poetry are; Flarf poetry (poetry created from a range of different internet searches), Blackout poetry (poetry created but taking existing texts and blacking out a majority of the text, leaving the words exposed to create a meaning) and Alternative Literature (Alt-Lit) (a literature community that publishes and draws it’s motifs from the internet).

The idea that no more creative content can ever be created is and extreme concept and at first seems absurd. However after looking at some of the examples given in today’s lecture it has become apparent to me that this idea is more plausible. After the lecture from Andrea, she gave us an immersive workshop that forced us to take already existing content from the internet and create a poem from it. My first reaction to this was to look at the music industry and the art of lyric writing, involving just words it would allow me to take certain feelings and emotions from a song and change them to create and entirely different meaning.

For this task I looked at the songs written and sung by the alternative R&B artist ‘The Weeknd’. With a majority of his music being quite sensual and romantic I wanted to see if I could create something very contrasting, a piece of poetry with a negative connotation that looks at one person’s role in society. Aesthetically I wanted it to look physically constructed, for this reason I used screen shots from a lyric website and combined them in a collage style.

‘Bleached Dreams – Troubling Places’ – Greta Hauer

Greta opened today’s lecture by looking at the concept of simulation (definition; an imitation/an assumption of a false appearance). The idea that people pretend to have or experience something that is not real. She started with using Project Syria as a striking example of simulation. This was a virtual animated landscape modelled as a replica of the streets in Syria, during the animation, which opens very atmospheric and cultural, a bomb is set off on the corner of one on the roads sending the animated figures in the location into panic and confusion. This shocking yet very real simulation was made to show people the very harsh reality of war and what is currently happening in certain areas. Using games design in a different context to build a virtual version of the war I found very effective, as it relays the message in a very relatable context, shocking the audience.

Alan Bryman’s ‘The Disneyization of Society’ focuses on the idea that simulated locations such as Disneyland are created not as a simulation but as an alternate reality, causing people to view the actual reality as a simulation. The name for such locations being ‘non-spaces’ [places with no meaning, history or solid context]. As this theory really resonates with me, it would be interesting to look at other examples and explore the concept further, starting by looking at the works of Jean Baudrillard and his theories on the dystopia of non-spaces.
The second example Greta gave was the independent feature film ‘The Wall‘ directed by Julian Pölsler. A film which focuses on the concept of a dystopian reality in which this woman (shown above) is completely secluded from the rest of the word, separated by an invisible wall around her home. This would be an excellent text to refer to and examine if I was to look further in to Greta’s questions and think about focusing my essay around this topic.

Greta also left us with a workshop to carry out, in which the aim was to write a letter to a loved one describing a location you are in, be that a simulated space, actual space or a non space. This forced us to think further in to the features of spaces and the components used in the simulation of spaces.