summ( )n

From today and till Wednesday I am in Brussels, at the Digitally Driven Europe forum in the Expo Center. It’s a large (some say – the largest so far) gathering of the ICT folks, from all over Europe. From one side it is a show of multiple EU-funded research projects and business initiatives related to everything ‘digital’. But it is also a political statement, as explained by Neelie Kroes, currently EU Commissioner on ‘Digital Agenda’.

There is widespread belief that Europe is lagging behind in the IT-related innovation (and IT-related education, too). “That’s not true”, was the message by Ms. Kroes. “What we’re lagging behind in is a utilization of the knowledge we have, its conversion into new products and services, new beneficial things for people, and for the society at large”. In many ways the forum is an effort to boost the debates on what should be done to correct this unhealthy situation.

The forum’s halls are filled with hundreds of projects and presentations, all amazing, technologically sophisticated, cutting-edge etc (some are cool, too). However, so far I found only one stand that is not focussed on technology alone, but try to pose a really crucial question:

That’s how I would visualize my PICNIC experience so far: very bright, intensive, rich, turbulent, overwhelming. Perhaps not exactly mind-blowing, but still a very informative and inspiring cocktail (and a few presentations were absolutely great). In any case, the two days so far have been very fruitful and productive. As a bonus track, I met a lot of old friends, and made contacts with quite a few new interesting people.

I am lagging a bit behind with processing/uploading all the images I am making (so far I have only managed to upload pictures from the first day) and with writing about all the presentations and installations (although I managed to write a http://www.demotix.com/news/452203/picnic-festival-opens-amsterdam-redesign-world); and tomorrow I am off to Amsterdam again, to participate in the IoT session, so there will be not many chances to write something decent. I guess I should count on the weekends, to wrap up the very first impressions.

Tomorrow I am giving a lecture in the local branch of the Fontys University, for their minor on Strategic Innovation. The content will be similar to the talks I gave earlier this year in Moscow and St. Petersburg, although I added a new chapter, on the recent methods of ‘future studies’. I expect a more difficult talk, since I have twice less time, and even more stuff to talk; we’ll see how I will manage.

Yay! I have received a press-accreditation to this year’s edition of Picnic, an international festival of new media, art and design in Amsterdam! I will be there on Sep 22 and 23, and will write for Demotix (but of course will post a lot of images & stories here too). There will be a lot of old friends/peers/ex-colleagues there, and I am sure plenty of new people to meet and talk too.

NB: The title of the posting is a reference to a famous sci-fi novel by the Russian brothers-writers Strugatsky, called Пикник на обочине (or Roadside Picnic). Written in 1972, this short novel made a huge impact on the sci-fi industry in general, and brought an international fame to the authors (as well as additional problems for them in their own country, then the USSR). The story was further immortalized by Andrey Tarkovsky in his 1979 movie Stalker, and later served as a background for the same-name video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R (and all its sequels, prequels etc.) To my knowledge, there is another full-blown movie in production, but very little is known about its release date.

I always wondered if the founders of Picnic were aware of the novel when creating the name for their new festival; I am sure that by now somebody mentioned that novel to them, and made a parallel between a surreal and full of (not always safe) surprises zone of the Picnic-as-in-novel, and Picnic-as-a-festival. I could try to figure out it, in case I will manage to talk them next week. Stay tuned!

Logos galore! Summ()n has developed a game (code name ’Happy Street: Better City, Better Life’) for a Caviar Rouge design forum, organized by CaravanCultura , to be held in Van Abbemuseum, during the Dutch Design Week! Pheew!

Ok, an attempt to decipher of this logo thicket: CaravanCultura is an agency that promotes cultural innovation and conducts a range of cross-cultural projects and initiatives. Summ()n is very happy to partner with CC and already participated in its annual CreArt forum in Brussels.

Caviar Rouge is another branded annual project of Caravan Cultura and Yelena Kharitonova, its passionate leader. A week-long event is aligned with the Dutch Design Week, a nation-wide festival of design and creativity traditionally held in Eindhoven in October. This year’s edition of Caviar Rouge is already a third in a raw and as before will provide an excellent opportunity for designers and other creative professionals to see and learn from the DDW, and to share their own ideas with the peers. From what I know, the Caviar Rouge program is completely filled with formal meetings and informal discussions, debates, workshops, and lectures; if you need a total cultural immersion, this is it.

This year we will add another format to the already very interesting program of the forum: following Summ()n’s philosophy, we will play a game, to challenge people’s ideas about the future of creative spaces and co-create the prototypes of ‘Better Life’ (yes, we always aim at modest goals). A very interesting dimension is that the game will be played in Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, one of the most original and creative institutions, not only in the Netherlands, but also worldwide, I believe. The museum itself is currently progressing to the third, and the final stage of the ‘Play”, its own program of cultural research and art provocation, and it seems only logical to play our game in its premises.

We look forward to the game, it should be an exiting event! It is announced as an ‘openbaar’ (=public), so hurry up to register and secure your place among the players, and not only the observers.

PS: When writing this post, I’ve discovered another game, to be also played in Van Abbemuseum during the DDW. A Tricksters Tricked workshop by Chris Lee will explore “alternative currencies as a starting point to think about economic networks”. Sounds fascinating too, and I will try to attend this event as well. I wonder how close it will be to the Kashklash game/initiative (I’ve been to one of their sessions in Geneva, during Lift’09).

This year’s edition of Picnic will start in ten days, September 22d. I will not be speaking this year, but plan to attend at least some events and presentations, and hope to use this time in Amsterdam to also arrange a few long-planned meetings. I will also write for Demotix, and see if I can convince more media-outlet to commission my stories.

Last weekend Eindhoven (or rather it’s Strij-S complex) hosted Flux-S, an ‘international art festival’. It was already a second edition for Flux-S, so the festival can claim its annual status. It also claimed the ‘future’ theme, with a somewhat enigmatic subtitle of this year ‘Drafts Establishing Future’.

Everything ‘future’-related is very welcomed in this blog, and I was going to write a proper story, starting with a recap of Flux-S’09. To all my surprise, I didn’t find any records about last year’s event in the blog. We visited the festival’s premises, and I do remember quite well a number of interesting concepts (of which I took quite a lot of pictures). Strangely, all that didn’t find a way here, and I started to ask myself why.

It was a very original concept (for me, at least), to rethink the meaning of the (urban) space, and imagine its possible reincarnations in various art forms. The last year intro video, with a swirl of the colorful stripes rushing thought an abandoned building, was amazing (you can still see it on their site, Flux-S’09), and very well expressed the intention and the focal point of the event, to enchant the old complex with new layers of meaning. In my view, this was best manifested in the installation by Femke Shaap ‘Layers and Skins’ (which we between us renamed into Light Icebergs):

It was amazingly simple, yet amazingly powerful a show: big and small pieces of foam plastic cut into (more or less) crystal shapes, distributed over a huge dark room and lighted by slow-mo projections. The result was a completely surreal space, totally immersing, soothing and elevating you at the same time. There were few other interesting projects presented, yet I didn’t write about them either, back then. However, as I understand now, it was not because the event didn’t impact me; it did, very much so, and there is an easy way to ‘prove’ it: I counted at least six (6) images from the festival that went to my own aman-geld project . Those images were not necessarily the part of the art projects presented at the festival – for example, a fragment of an impressive performance Boom, or a light trace of the installation Picture of the Mountain, by Sema Bikerovic. More important (for me, at least) were the images of the broken windows, or peeled walls that became real art pieces, as if the event transformed them, conjuring the new beauty.

Interesting enough, the story about art festival therefore becomes the one about my own works created thanks to the event, and not about the displayed art objects. I wonder if this may become a new criteria of any art event (or an establishment, like a museum) – it’s not important what you show, it is important what the visitors will produce after your show.

Re the Flux-S’10 itself: I may actually try to write more stories this time, and tell about a few projects here, in separate postings. But to be honest the general impression was a bit disappointing; first, there were less projects presented (yet they were described in many more (pseudo) sophisticated words). Second, the event lost in many ways its initial ‘spatial’ nature, and the original theme of spatial rebirth, or reincarnation, it played so well first time. There were also not so many cases of really interactive and co-creative art (there were some, but I would expect more, especially from the event taking about the ‘future’). But let me reserve a few ‘spots’ for the future postings, where I would try to be more descriptive, and less judgmental.

I like the subtitle, though, with all its ambiguity. One can read “Drafts Establishing Future” as merely three separate words, creating a certain ‘semantic dance’. You can read it as “the drafts that establish the future’. But it can be also understood as “the future that establish (= preemptively form) certain drafts”. I would like to know more about the copyrighters’ ideas, as well as to listen to the opinions of the native speakers.

Australian agency 2thinknow issued a report about a hundred most innovative cities of the world. The chart about presents the first 20 cities, and the full list can be found at their website (albeit the report is not for free, and not cheap).

The dominance of European cities in the list is remarkable; 13 out of the top 20 most innovative cities are in Europe (and in total 57 of one hundred). It resonates very well with the opinions of the IT industry captains I’ve heard during the most recent congress in Amsterdam: all as one they mentioned a very distinctive innovation climate created in Europe. This creative and inspiring atmosphere is far from the usual cliche of Europe as an ageing and boring babushka; quite the opposite: ever complex, multilayered, and often turbulent realties of the Europe resulted in creation of a very characteristic thinking: open, vibrant and agile.

It’s of course a pleasure to see Amsterdam in the top three cities (The Hague (55) and Rotterdam (70) are there too, but not Eindhoven). The latter is trying hard to position itself as a center of creativity and design, and the mission of the Eindhoven-based Brainport Development agency is all about supporting innovation and ‘industries of the future’. It’s interesting that the key assumption of the Brainport vision is the unique position of the city, in the center of the vortex of creativity in Europe. Which is true, almost all nearest cities – Antwerp, Brussels, Dusseldorf, Aachen, Frankfurt – are in this list. But Eindhoven is not yet there.

As a side note, St. Petersburg and Moscow of Russia managed to get in, but only on 84th and 97th places, respectively.

It’s always difficult to judge such a ranking without a clear description of the criteria used and the data they gathered. But it’s clearly more that just the usual economic indicators, or industrial and political might that propelled the cities to this list, and rather their capacity to mobilize people’s and communal creativity, similar to the views expressed at the Human Cities festival in Brussels (as well as at many other similar events, of course).

The Russian branch of the German car maker Audi has recently produced a very interesting piece of communication, that creatively works with the ‘future’ theme. Their 2011 calendar shows a variety of seemingly futuristic scenes, all having one detail in common: independently of the portrayed future, it always has an Audi car in ti; the future is Audi (even if this future will be unfolding on one of the Saturn’s moons).

This trick is often named as the ‘branded memories of the future’. It is widely used in multiple sci-fi movies (from Blade Runner through all Matrixes to Minority Report, and further). Certain future landscapes are presented in an impressive and convincing way, shaping people’s readiness to these futures when they ‘occur’ (or in fact, priming people to start working toward such futures already). The embodiment of the brand into such future sceneries works as a subtle, but nevertheless very powerful method of ‘colonization of the future’ with today’s ideas.

In case of Audi (you can see all the images at the Behance, Audi 2011 Calendar) this method is applied ad absurdo; instead of creating ‘realistic’, ‘grounded’ and ‘believable’ future scenarios, the team compiles a panorama of almost grotesque possible futures, compiled out of the overused and hyperdosed cliches: Coruscant-like cityscapes filled with the Syd Mead type of devices and vehicles of all sorts.

Paradoxically, this range of total simulacrums works perfectly well: Audi associates itself not with any particular cut of the futurer, but with a Future, with the very essence of the idea of the future itself. Audi = Future, future = Audi.

Amazingly clever, ironic/iconic a case, and perfectly executed too; kudus to the team.

Few days ago I bumped into a new video on TED.com, a speech by Seth Priebatsch The game layer on top of the world. I can’t embed the video here, so you need to go to their site to view it; and it’s worth doing, the speech is short, but very informative and insightful, and Seth is definitely a very charismatic speaker. As often happens in the time of the social web, the video also became a ‘social object‘, and has a great additional value by now because of the numerous comments of the viewers, expressing various pro-s and contra-s about gaming.

Having in mind this large volume of comments (over a hundred at the moment of writing this text, and growing), I was therefore somewhat surprised that I didn’t find the comments with ‘whys’. There are a lot of comments on whether the ‘game layer’ will appear or not, or whether it will be good for us or not. But no one asks why we need this gaming layer now, and why it should became even bigger in the future.

In his speech Seth himself simply postulates that the games will become more present in the future, and more actively used; a ‘see the trend and extrapolate ‘ kind of logic. (It’s important to note here that Seth does not mean games as a product, as we see them, for example, in a gaming industry, but rather as a modality, a way of doing other things as games; such an understanding is close to an approach often called ‘serious games‘). Seth obviously embraces this trend since he sees games (and specific gameplays) as the very powerful tools, able to impact human behavior. Such gameplays (he tells about four of them, although hints that he knows more) can be used to impact people’s motivations and activities, and support marketing and communication actions aimed at behavioral changes.

The concept of ‘gaming layer’ is close to the very core of what we do at Summ()n, and it seems very important for me to figure out the why-s before the how-s. I think that games can do much more that what is suggested by Seth; I also believe that it is these other capacities of games make then increasingly important, essential for our development and evolution.

Yes, games are very powerful change agents, but is It’s not enough to just efficiently move you from A to Z, using gameplay as an effective vehicle. We increasingly need to move beyond Z-s (even ‘beyond the beyond‘), into unknown, and more importantly, into ‘unknown unknown’ territories. Games, with their intrinsic mechanisms and qualities (such as role-playing, suspension of the ‘rules of reality’ and immersion into the realms of imaginary) can act as powerful medium in exploration of the unchartered territories, imaginable – and un-imaginable – possibilities. I argue that these are the tools we need now, and will increasingly need in the future, to be able to cope with the complex and turbulent developments of our civilization (see more on that in my earlier slideshow, Preparing for the turbulent futures).

And yes, games can be also used as ‘behavioral change agents’ too, but these changes need to lead to the transcendence of the existing social roles and practices, and to the formation of the new skills and even new identities (rather than as a mere ‘training tools’). That’s why we need the ‘game layers’, and that’s why they will proliferate.