summ( )n

The theme of ‘space’ was present abundantly later in my encounters, both professional and ‘artistic’ (well, in aman_geld it’s always there anyway). Few days ago I visited the launch of the two new books, organized by the Stroom center in the Hague. One of the book presented was the latest album of photographs by Mark Pimlott (center), Canadian artist and writer living in the Netherlands now. The book was beautifully designed by Joost Grootens (right), and published by Jap Sam Books (Eleonoor Jap Sam is on the left on the picture).

This is not the first time they collaborate, few years ago Mark and Joost published a large and richly illustrated volume Without and within, a collection of essays on ‘territory and interior’ by Mark. The book got an accolade for its design (e.g., The Best Dutch Book Design Award 2008) and content (The Financial Times Best Books 2007), although in the editions of that kind the form and the content are intimately intertwined.

I am now a lucky owner of a signed copy, by both the Author and a Designer

PS: That’s not exactly how the cover of the book look like, but it’s not completely alien to the original either; it’s a collage of the cover and the back side of it (it has this strange ‘dangling’ design, and plays with the perception of the front and back sides, so I decided it’s fair to show only one of them.)

Speaking of Creative Spaces, I had actually been in such one recently; or rather, it was a place where people discussed how to create creative spaces”: a symposium on this topic was held the Utrecht University. If the picture above does not convey the feeling of ‘creativity’, I can show another one, of a completely psychedelic carpet in this very auditorium that created a strikingly creative contrast with the ash-grey chairs

I visited only the last day of the three-day event, and I know that the first two days, of the field-trips and practical workshops, had been voted by the participates as ‘simply amazing. But the last day, of more reflective presentations and debates, was of great value as well. I’ve learned quite a lot, and also met a whole range of new and interesting people. The day was kicked off by Remko van der Lugt, from the HU (whom I know for many years already) and who shared a few theoretical frameworks and some practical examples of what can be defined as ‘creative space’:

There was a cascade of interesting presentation after that (too pity that some of them were run in parallel, so you couldn’t follow them all without creative cloning): I won’t tell about all, but will mentioned the one by Jaap Warmenhoven, from the Twynstra & Gudde consultancy; apparently they’ve built a special space (-s even, since Jaap told us that they’ve just completed the second one). The last ‘creative room’ they was developed in collaboration with theater designers, and is a very interactive and reconfigurable space; I am keen to learn more about this case, and will try to visit these rooms at some point.

The gem of the day was a presentation by David Kirsh, cognitive psychologist from UC San Diego; I remember listening to his presentation some years ago, at the TU/e, when he talked about his theory of ‘cognition distributed in space’. I remember a mixed feeling of profound insightfulness and ‘what’s new here?’ after his lecture. Familiar with the schools of psychology by Vygotosky, Luria and Leontiev, I can’t be really surprised by the very idea that our thinking is mediated by the externalized physical artifacts (=’tools’ how they will be defined by these folks.) Yet David also provided a plethora of very nuanced observations and conclusions, situated in a variety of contexts, and was a real intellectual pleasure to listen to him.

That was the case in Utrecht again; the presentation was long, rich, insightful and brilliantly performed; situated learning was happening right here-and-now, and when talking about cognitive costs of interruptions he was brilliantly interrupted, and.. what was the topic I was going to tell?

Oh, yeah! Both David’s site and a wikipedia page are full of resources – papers, presentations etc, really worth visiting and reading. I tried to capture as many slides as I could, and most likely will compile them into one set, with my comments etc, and will place it here too. But David was also showing a lot of interesting examples from his work with a dance troop, with the videos. That was more difficult to record, I only have a few photos of that; I hope that the organizers will found a way to share it with us all somehow.

There were many more interesting stories too, of course; all in all, it was a very informative day, and very reassuring. It confirmed that many things we try to achieve with Summ()n, namely our experiential exploration of possible futures (which by definition involves spatial aspects) resonates very well with people. I amy only regret a bit that we didn’t know about such an event in advance, otherwise we would contributed into it more actively, for example, by presenting one of our spatial installations (e.g., Walking Backward to the Future).

I wrote about this ‘Russian Silicon Valley‘ project back in March when I just came from Russia. It got much more mature since then, with more officials appointed to manages, more meetings held and more criticism voiced. During last few days it became clear that Russians want to play it nearly literally, as shown by the most recent trip by Dmitry Medvedev to California, where he met the key actors of this innovation paradise (Steve Jobs who presented him the new iPhore, Cisco’s John Chambers, Twitter’s guys and many others, I assume). I guess, this idea of cloning the Silicon Valley on the Russian soil may still inspire many heads in the Russian administration.

Similar to many others, however, I remain skeptical about this particular take on the idea of innovation boosting in Russia. I believe that the cultural gap between the US and Russian societies is too wide (and only widening lately, if we look at less and less democratic conduct of the Russian government). I think that it may benefit from closer, and more similar socio-technological environments, like the technoparks of Germany, England or France. Or Holland, for that matter.

Earlier in April we tried to chip in with our own suggestion in this direction (that can be broadly defined as a ‘constructive criticism by offering an alternative action’). In short, we suggested to make a joint event here in Eindhoven, where the Russian and Dutch teams would share their experiences and future plans about ‘strategic innovation’. Why Eindhoven? Living here for many years, I know from inside that this city (and the region in general) has created quite a unique ecology of innovation, both technological and social.

We thought the annual Dutch Design Week held in the city in October, would be the best time (and space) for such an exercise (and as Summ()n we would also developed an interesting format for such a meeting, a combo of a ‘serious game’ and an experiential environment. I didn’t write about these plans (perhaps, wrongly), because they were ‘under development’. They still are, in fact, or rather they are under un-developmens, since neither Russian nor (to my surprise) Dutch expressed any particular interest (more precisely, both sides did expressed an interest, but nothing more than that). Yet another possible future that people fail to believe.

I uploaded a few slides we prepared back then; by now, they are more a historical document that a working plan. But who knows? may be they will be useful again in the future.

PS: I was pinked by some readers warning me that the posting sounds too pessimistic; that was not an intention. There is a difference between ‘skepticism’ and ‘pessimism’, and would obviously love to see the projects like Skolkovo moving forward very well (and even contribute to such moves, when possible). It is just the experience of many other similar initiatives that rings a tiny warning bell.

Last week was very full: meetings, trips, two conference, two workshops, and even a lecture on blasphemy (!) at the end. I got a bit exhausted, and abandoned this blog for a while (I had too much to write about, to too little time to do it). I will try to catch up during this week, which – at least for now – looks a bit more calm. During all these meetings and event I took about a thousand pictures, and processing those (as a preparation for writing) took quite some time.

I should have got tired from all this ‘visual processing’, but in reality I got used it, browsing through the visuals and became almost a natural state of mind. It is in this state of mind I’ve bumped into a description of a nice exhibition in the Museo del Prada, in Madrid, called Richard Hamilton: Picasso’s Meninas. It was a double homage, to Picasso himself, and then, in turn, to his own homage to Velazquez (I wrote ‘it was’, because the exhibition was scheduled till June 20, yesterday, but as I just discovered, it is extended till July 20).

Frankly, I didn’t know that the the volume of remakes and re-interpretations of the famous Las Meninas is so large; Picasso alone made more than fifty art-works in the end of 1950s, and ever since the volume’s only growing. I surfed the web a bit, and was overwhelmed with a large amount of art works, by professional, ‘serious’ artists and amateurs alike. While surfing, I started to make a slideshow, as a draft compilation of what I found. The resulted presentation is, of course, far from a complete corpus (if such is at all possible by now), but is sizable enough to make some observations and draw some conclusions.

Las Meninas is seemingly one of the most known and valued paintings in the history of art (and as such, of human civilization in general). I knew it from the childhood, but never ‘got it’ – until I read the famous opening of The Order of Things, by Michel Foucault. That was a revelational text, in many senses – not only explaining the content, but also showing how one can analyze an art work so deeply and intensively, and draw such profound philosophical conclusions.

With time I ‘grew over’ the Foucaldian analysis, I think now that although revealing very important dimensions of this work, he conceals (or rather blinds himself about) many others; but I would need more space and time to write about this in any details. Just as a thought experiment – what if Foucault would write not about Las Meninas per se, but about 50+ works after the Meninas by Picasso? Their very number, this abundance, their multiplicity would shed a light on how we think today, and how we may think in the future, the theme quite central to Summ()n (remember, Foucalut was writing about epistemology, not art critics).

Anyway, independently from the results, I enjoyed the very process of discovering such an immense variety, and creativity of the interpretations of the famous work by the Velazquez, and hope you will do, too (to see the slides, click on the picture above).

Picasso’s Las Meninas (a sketch from his notebook)

I decided to deviate a bit from the otherwise ‘always real events’ description in this blog (this was also a hint from the readers who advised me write more often about books, movies, or even ‘just thoughts’, and not only report about meetings and gatherings of all sorts). Let’s see if we can summon a wider format here .

Yesterday we went to the Prince of Persia. a newly released movie from Mike Newell. I hardly played the original game back in the 1990s, not did I manage to play the new, just released one, so I was pretty innocent about the plot. I assumed there would be some gravity-defying jumping in the movie; this assumption was correct, and jumping there galore.

But little I knew that the key thread of the plot will be related to the ‘future’, the topic ever close to the things we do at Summ()n. I didn’t notice the tagline of the movie, ‘Defy the Future’. I don’t even recall that the posters here have it. All the ‘future’ developments of the plot were, therefore, a complete surprise for me. How to sum it up?

The story is centered around a magical device, a dagger, that is able to ‘send’ its user back in time, thus making him (or her, although the users of the dagger in the movie are all men; that despite the fact that originally it belongs to a woman) capable to change the history. it works as a sort of Ctrl-Z button (Cmd-Z for Mac users). (I wonder, by the way, if this element appeared in the movie because of its game pedigree).

With its default settings the dagger is able to send you back only to a short period of time, but under special conditions this time scope can be increased (which at some point brings the viewer almost back to the beginning of the film’s plot). Bad guys want to posses the dagger for the evil purposes, good guys try to prevent it ‘to save the world’, they eventually succeed, etcetc, the precise details are not so interesting.

What interested me is this very central idea of ‘working with the future’ employed in the film. There is no such thing as ‘forecasting’ or ‘foresighting’ the future. One has to go and experience the ‘future’ to full, when it’s already a present, and do it together with other actors and agencies. But some can ‘undo’ the experience, return to the moment when they can re-experience it, but equipped with the ‘memories of the futures’, which help them to do it ‘better’ this time. The slogan ‘defy the future’ should, of course, be read as ‘defy the others’ in this context.

This time machine reminded me another movie we’ve seen recently, Next with Nicolas Cage. This is not a very recent movie, it’s about three or four years old, but we didn’t see back then. Cage plays a guy able to do the same trick, sending himself back in time (no device used, he IS the device).

Next didn’t have such a picturesque scenery as the Prince, so they had to elaborate on the future playing more. If you have Ctrl-Z option, you tend to use it very often, and indeed, Cage probes multiple futures all the time (in the final scene on the boat this is taken to the max when he literally multiply himself to simultaneously probe different paths). It’s looks beautiful, but not very logical, in the CtrlZ world there is no need for efficiency, since there is no time, at least in a normal sense: time is always re-playable, thus never actually ticking.

My final observation is more of esthetic nature: in both cases the directors use the image of dust, free-floating particles to illustrate this idea of de-constractable and re-playable futures (in case of Next this mostly refers to the last scene, with multiple Cages). I feel also a resonance with the metaphor of Dust as introduced by Philip Pullman in his epic trilogy His Dark Materials (and beautifully reincarnated in The Golden Compass film later). In Pullman’s world the Dust was also a symbol of multiple worlds, although this was not a multiplicity as a constant repetition, but as an infinite number of the parallel worlds.

Earlier todaWe went to the Vanabbe Museum, to see their joint exhibition with the ‘Fontys FutureMediaLab’. The name of the latter sounds great, but is also a bit confusing; I didn’t find any traces of this establishment as yet at the website of the Fontys University (former Fontys Hogeschool). I know that they have recently opened a new program in Art & Technology (which also has a track on ‘games’). They also have a well-developed research and educational track on future studies (called
The Trend Watching Lectorate).

But the name of the FutureMediaLab most likely refers to a student project which aimed at the development of a few ‘futuristic’ concepts, to be later presented at the Museum (which is also confirmed by this short movie on YouTube).

Anyway, the exhibition was there, and we’ve been kindly guided by the students over the three concepts presented at the show. The first concept, called ArtiShocking, is aimed at
the tech-savvy and hip youngsters, who would want to eat healthy but don’t know how. The concept offers to them an engaging, multi-platform system, assisting them in learning about the healthy food recipes, facilitating the purchasing, and in general involving these people into a community-based activities.

I remember discussing almost exactly the same system with the guys from Unilever, Albert Heijn (large supermarket chain in the Netherlands), and a bunch of similar folks. The need was (and is) apparently there, young people do want to eat healthy (yet consistently eat junk food), they don’t know much about health eating and confused with what is not presented at the PoS and beyond. And they do like to hang our in all kind of web communities. Looks like it’s not a rocket science to link these dot.

Alas, to my knowledge all similar attempts have failed to produce any sizable impact (by the way, Albert Heijn does have by now a similar system, although not necessarily oriented to the youth). What’s up? There are a couple of issues to blame: A, the ‘gameplay’ of these interventions (understood broadly, of course, since some of them do not position themselves as games) tend to be a crappy one, not taking into account neither initiation and ‘n00bness’ stages, nor offering any decent ‘lvl-ing’ strategies. And B, these interventions tend to see the existing situation as a void space they populated with their offer. It is never a void, but always a presence of already existing ‘solution’ (although it may not necessarily be understand as such, even by the people themselves). In other words, if you try offer something ‘new’, be sure there is already something there; you need to think about a ‘conversation’ from the old ‘offer’ to the new one.

The second concept, called SWAN, was targeted at the so called tech-women (of unspecified age), who are apparently very knowledgeable yet bored to death, and so would welcome this ‘Alternative Reality Game’ to help in structuring their free time. The gameplay (in this case explicitly defined as such) consists of QR Codes mediated quests (tasks to do, puzzles to solve etc), and unfolds in both virtual and real worlds. That is what Wired is basically doing right now with their latest gamagazine (see their Enigma game there). Back to SWAN – my anti-feminist attitude doesn’t buy it. Neither does the anti-feminist attitude of my wife.

The last concept was targeted at ’6-9 old kids’. Called Wijland, it was aimed to solve a purported alienation of the kids in the cities from the ‘nature’, to the extent they have no clue how and where their food is produced, and how a farm works etc. So the idea was to create a playful model of the farm, allowing for some interactions in ‘real world’ and also leading to some task in the online ones. I can’t really comment on this concept, our 10 year old son said he doesn’t see the point (=need), but perhaps we live in a quite special environment here in Brabant: there are plenty of real mini-farms here that are designed to show to the kids the life, of both animals and people there. I also know that if these farms try to install anything with a display in it, it attracts all the kids (and distract them therefore from the ‘real-life’ activities at such farms.) Don’t have a good solution myself, but this one doesn’t look very plausible.

But ANYWAY. Yet another great initiative of the Vanabee Museum, and kudos to all the students; student projects are to be, well, student projects.

PS: I thought a bit why my comments on these concepts were relatively harsh; they are not that bad, after all. I then realized that they all have the same fault, two faults, actually: 1. they always project the current state of affairs into the future, assuming that it always be ‘as today’, and 2. they don’t foresee that they themselves will start changing people, and don’t want to deal with it (mostly because they don’t understand it). I m gradually becoming allergic to such things. Although to blame students for the second is not fair, that dimension is not explored by the majority of designers anyway.

Do you want to know the future shape of technology? Then, perhaps, you need to talk to the same name foundation, STT, or Stichting Toekomstbeeld der Techniek, based in the Hague. The whole purpose of the STT is to ‘explore new trends and develop inspiring foresights on technology and society. For that purpose STT facilitates a free space in which enthusiastic stakeholders meet and construct creative views on the future’.

Sounds great, and it is a great regret that I didn’t know about them until very recently. But better later than never, and now we met and talked, and shared experiences and approaches. I am most interested in two projects our of three STT currently runs (I am actually also interested in the third, The Future of Technology in Africa, but can’t imaging seriously contributing in it.)

The other two are the Future of Serious Games and the Future of Decision Making (especially in view of the emerging Wisdom of the Crowd approach).

We had a very interesting conversation with Jacco van Uden, leader of the Serious Games foresight, I felt a lot of synergy between what we do at Summ()n, when we use our ‘playing the futures’ approach, with how they practice future studies in general, and serious games in particular. There is a lot of very interesting information on their site, earlier reports, white papers, links and sources; a web place really worth visiting.

Surprisingly to myself, I didn’t take the pictures of the institution (somewhat ironically, it is located in a very old building, not necessarily evoking associations with the ‘future’; but nice one). So, these are the pictures I took later, while walking to my next meeting. It’s actually amazing how densely our urban environments are covered with the traces of someone’s else ‘games’. It’s just a matter of perception to see them (and may be a matter of courage and curiosity to join.)

I am talking later today at BizCamp, a Belgium reincarnation of the barcamp/unconference idea. The gathering is hosted by the SAP Lounge in Vilvoorde, near Brussels.

As a cover I am using the picture of our boy playing inside a wonderful installation called Laser Sound Projector, by the Dutch artist Edwin van der Heide. For me this is a very close approximation of what we mean by ‘playing with the futures’. The boy himself, however, when he saw the title of my talk, said that the very concept of interacting with the future is ‘philosophishly impossible‘. He’s 10.5 now, just for the record.

UPDATE: The day was great, I managed to get there much later that I expected (lost my way somehow), but then the gathering was really good, stimulating and pleasant at the same time. Thank you all!

The slides I presented there: How to play with the futures?

Two final pictures: BizCamp Standing Together and BizCamp Falling Apart

In addition to the WCIT, I also managed to visit Art Amsterdam’10, an annual art fair traditionally held in the RAI Exhibition Center. It was not so overwhelming as the ArtBrussels’10, but definitely more impressive and interesting that ArtRotterdam’10 fair I’ve been to in February ( I now realized that I didn’t even write about it back than; bit of a shame, there were a few interesting pieces there too).

As always, many pictures I took can be seen in my Flickr set, ArtAmsterdam’10, and here are just a few random observations.

I thought our Walking Backward to the Future installation would benefit from such a beautiful and culture-specific surveillance camera

This was another example of simple, but quite powerful installation; a short looping video was framed into a 3D physical ‘toothy’ art-work, creating a bizarre mix of scary, yet intriguing feeling.

My favorite was an installation called ‘hardlink’ by Dutch artist Willem Besselink; we saw his earlier work Re:Id during the Museum Night in Rotterdam last year, where he reconstructed a flow of the visitors using a provocative mix of modern RFID technology and antique brick-laying.

This time again it was a collision of high-tech QR Codes with a very low-tech foam sculpting.

The idea is that the spectator can not actually see the art work; or rather she can, but only from the distance, reflected in a spheric mirror hanging above a huge cube. It is the top of the cube which is an art-work, but it defies your effort to see or interact with with. There are even more levels of parody and mocking here: even if you manage to ‘use’ this specific QR Code appropriately, for example, using your mobile phone with scanning app (there was a copy of the code laying near for your convenience), the link would lead you to the very picture of the same installation! Alienated and self-referential smart technologies, a perfect expression of what Richard Eskow called Cerebral Imperialism.

Tom Chatfield, from the UK magazine Prospect talked about games, and how they ‘create value’ (Innovation engines: How electronic games generate value). It was interesting that in the context of this congress he immediately distance his talk from now popular genre of ‘serious games’; now was he talking about a video games industry in terms of the sold boxes and gained revenue. His talk was more focussed on a very different developments that emerge now thanks to the video games, and around them.

I like his example of the Guitar Hero, the game that was creatively abused (in Scotland if I remember) and became a platform for activist movement in the area of school education. Somewhat similar is the machinema industry, that uses games as a vehicles for content production and often distribution too (WoW is great example of that, up to and including The Guild phenomenon; but Tom very skillfully never mentioned WoW, valid but a bit overused by now an example).

Tom Steinberg, from MySociety presented a few cases of how modern digital solutions can impact political activism, and the very politics and governmental activities themselves. We all now how impactful can be Twitters,Faceboos, and YouTubes these days. Tom, however, thinks that it is again, rather a creative abuse of these tools, initially created for different purposes (social communication). According to Tom, this is all good, but to be really efficient, political activism should be equipped with more specialized tools, focussed applications that are in synch with information flows and decision-making practice.

One of his examples was FixMyStreet that not only allows for people to “report, view, or discuss local problems”, but automatically channel their complains (or compliments) to the right public bodies.

Adam Greenfield talked about connected cities: Reading the city, writing the city: Urban experience in a networked age. I listened to this story of him lat year, during the MindTrek, and many of the slides can be found in my set on Flickr, MindTrek’09. This time he added new dimensions to the plot (very much further toward the new re-writable city), and new examples too; I hope to find his presentation somewhere on the web, at some point.

Finally, Anab Jain, from Superflux. I spotted the agency earlier this year, via publication in the Wired magazine, but as we later discovered with Anab, we actually met first, albeit shortly, during the last year Lift’09 conference in Geneva. Anyway, this time it was again an excellent presentation, you can see all the slides on their blog: Designing for India’s Immaterial Urbanism. You could also see a short movie about one of the presented project, Yellow Chair Stories