a Media laboratory at MIT

Future(s), Fiction and Cultural Design

Outline of this talk

A. Imagining the future(s)

B. Are these futures yet to come ?

C. Experimental media and other
modern forms of storytelling

A. Imagining the future

Interdisciplinary, multicultural teams, brainstorming with artists, designers, creative people from industry, academia, engineering, media to create

unseen representation of technology

extreme and radically new scenarios of technology

sometimes a debate around its implication for society, culture

A. Creating an unbounded vision

Compared to traditional MIT research, few boundaries in terms of topics, assessment...

Exploring scenarios is more important than doing real development or products.

Importance of demos, physical objects or social experience that transport the audience into an hypothetical context and frame the narrative.

Case Study 1 - Display of the future

Case Study 2 - Car of the future

Case Study 3 - Clock of the future

Case Study 4 - Brain of the future

Case Study 5 - Robot of the future

B. Are these futures yet to come ?

A central question for futurologists since their production is fictive therefore contingent (fictum - pure creation - from the verb fingo meaning to touch, form, create, contrive.)

Nick Negroponte TED talk in 1984

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc8Ks6KOySg&feature=channel

Persuasion, retorics vs Plausible deniability.

Usually the future is better, augmented, with some sort of meliorative contribution that makes it different from the past.

A Media Laboratory, like a Think-Tank or any Institute or organization that predicts (tell in advance pre-dictum) or invent (pro-grammare create the rules in advance) is in a situation similar to an author, a storyteller, but with the difference that its discourse should be new and believable.

B. Maybe they already happened ?

Memex, Vannevar Bush, 1945

Atlantic Monthly article and illustration as a medium

Memex is the vision of the Augmented Web ( web 4.0 )

Itself an illustration of the research of Paul Otlet, Emmanuel Goldberg and others

From Sensorama, Myron Krueger, SHRDLU to Put-That-There, G-Speak, Sixth Sense

Gestural Interaction Paradigm

Intuitive interfaces such as touch, pen, actually standard before the mouse (cf Sage lightgun, RAND pen tablet, Sutherland Sketchpad).

Augmented Reality

Ivan Sutherland vs Steve Mann

Doug Engelbart and the ARC ( Augmentation Research Center) in the 60s

19452009

1974

20002010

1968

2008

B. Maybe some are not linked with reality

Engineering, Mass Production might be impossible, does it matter ?

Prototyping scenarios closer to design fiction, sometimes sci-fi, can create fertile debate and controversies around ideas.

Exemples

Holography, Rapid Solidification (from TED 1984 to today)

CNC machines to Food Printers, Organ Printers, Universal Fabricators

Biomechatronics and the augmented body

C. Contemporary Storytelling

Evolution of Public Opinion Crafting, Shaping (Cultural Design)

E. Bernays vs H.G.Wells (unconscious vs dystopian)

Spin-Pharmacist vs Spin-Doctors (predicting vs explaining)

Grassroots vs Astroturfing (natural sciences vs artificial sciences)

Ethics, responsability of media makers and relays vs charm, fascination for fiction, especially when narratives and stories are intriguing, charming, and better than this, plausible.

C. Anthropological Narratives

Like play or creativity, storytelling is constitutive of human culture (Huinzinga, Caillois, Bateson).

Stories are vehicles to gather attention and allow collective goals to be achieved using rhetoric, persuasive techniques and now technologies:

Network effect: from word of mouth to memes

Top-down Cosmogony, myths vs Bottom-up complex narratives

Control/Creation of story systems determine the discourse (for instance in the techno-social sphere, Mondo2000, Wired, Edge, OReilly Media and now Seeds for transhumanist dissemination) and also establishes social order.

C. Collective Response Abilities

Memetic machines

Amplification of story-bits and other high-impact sentences

Economy of attention, Aesthetics of these fictive bits

Necessity of awareness of media construction

Celebrating the importance of stories and critical thinking

Transformation machines

Deconstruction, Parody, Re-composition (Latour) and Re-mix

Open Forum (forae), public discussions, perspective taking

Beyond open-source towards Free Culture (Lessig, Hill) and Free Media

Appendix: Inventing the Present

Open-Source or Public Domain Projects that are released now. Inspiring people to do by giving tools for creation, debate or learning.

Many domains from citizen participation to education to new multitouch interfaces.

Community making and participation is as encouraged than discourse making

participation is a currency

emphasis on adapting to different cultures and communities

tension usually between integrity of the project and forking, diverging

Grassroots Mapping

Fablabs, How to make (almost) anything

Appendix: Scratch

Trackmate

Center for Future Civic Media