summ( )n

I read this article before I went to all these latest events, but manage to write about it only now; the ‘futures’ don’t always arrive in a proper time-order. It is an interview with, or rather a dialogue between Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of the now famous Black Swan book (and the same-name concept), and Agnieszka Kurant, Polish artist. It is published in the September issue of the Frieze, British magazine on contemporary art.

Taleb is a poet aka researcher of unpredictability and serendipity, and the way I found the article is just another confirmation of how right he is: I’d least expected to find such an opus about ‘future studies’ in any art magazine, even such a high-brow one as Frieze (I read it mostly in the context of my other project, aman_geld). Well, serendipity rulez again, and the ideas Taleb talks about in this interview are very relevant and important for Summ()n.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find this publication online> It would be great if the magazine published it as is, because its layout and design also help to convey the meaning; but even a plain text would help. Alas, none of that is available, so I took a few pictures of the pages. The quality is not perfect, but they are readable; in case you are interested, see the set Unknown Unknowns on my Flickr.

I also decided to retype some of the quotes from the paper here:

“There is an asymmetry between past and future, and it is too subtle for us to understand it naturally. The first consequence of this asymmetry is that, in people’s minds, the relationship between the past and the future does not learn from the relationship between the immediate and distant past. There is a blind spot: when we thin of tomorrow, we don’t frame it in terms of what we thought about yesterday or the day before yesterday.”

“Because of this introspective defect we fail to learn about the difference between our past predictions and the subsequent outcomes. When we think of tomorrow, we just project it as another yesterday.”

“The notion of the future mixed with chance, not a deterministic extension of your perception of the past is a mental operation that our mind can not perform. Chance is too fuzzy to be a category by itself.”

“Just as autism is called ‘mind blindness’, we should call this inability to think dynamically, to position oneself with respect to a future observer, ‘future blindness’.”

As the readers of this blog now, Summ()n tries to address exactly this ‘future blindness’, helping people to think differently about possible futures (and about multiple pasts, too). My way of thinking had been definitely influenced by the Taleb’s thoughts, so all these words are not a surprise but rather reaffirming chants.

What was new for me in the text are several few ideas about how to design for such world, how to “figure out how to live in the world we don’t understand very well.”

Taleb gives few advises, which can be also translated into the ‘qualities of design’.

“[lately] … I have become obsessed with the notion that, under epistemic limitations – some opacity concerning the future – progress (and survival) cannot tale place without redundancy. You don’t know today what may be needed tomorrow. This conflicts sharply with the notion of teleological design we have from reading Aristotle that an object has a clear purpose set by its designer.”

“… [A]nything that has a secondary use, and one you did not pay for, will present an extra opportunity should a heretofore unknown application emerge or a new environment appear. The organism with the largest number of secondary uses is the one that will gain most from environmental randomness and epistemic opacity!”

“Objects see to have invisible but significant auxiliary functions that we are not consciously aware of, but that allow them to thrive – and on occasion the auxiliary function become the principal one. So when you have a lot of functional redundancies, randomness helps, but on one condition: that you can benefit from the randomness more than you can be hurt by it.”

Obviously, these ideas are very alien to the dominant style of design at the moment, that is obsessed with ‘identification of the needs’ and then ‘developing the solutions to satisfy them’, preferably with ‘simplicity’ or ‘pragmatism’ in mind. Designing with redundancy, designing for complexity does require a different mindset (and also different criteria of ‘successfulness’ of design).

In other words, it does require to start thinking differently, and become different from what we are now:

“We should be prepared for the fact that the next large technological or historical surprise (or what some people call ‘unknown unknowns’), will not resemble what we have in mind. In other words, we have to learn to be abstract, and think in second order effects rather than being anecdotal (which I show to be against human nature).”

“Most ideas came from serendipity, and you want to maximize serendipity. Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t tell it what to do.”

And so “it’s impossible to predict who will change the world, because major changes are the result of accidents and luck. But we do know who society’s winners will be: those who are prepared to face Black Swans, to be exposed to them, to recognize them when they show up and to rigorously exploit them.”

What Taleb does not write about (at least here) is that his extremistan world would also require a very different structure of identity too, not only multiple, multifaceted and polyphonic, but also somewhat randomized.

I will be telling about most recent projects I’ve seen in no particular order; in fact, I am very tempted to use a randomizer of some sort when picking up the examples from a large pile of projects. This one has in fact some sort of randomness in it: the installation ‘Mirrorwall’ was created for Philips International by the UK-based agency rAndom International. I wrote about other installation by RI earlier, and even made a small movie based on what I’ve seen and experienced in Brussels.

Coincidentally, my second encounter with the work by rAndom International again occurred in Brussels, where their large-scale interactive installation was presented by the Philips Lighting team. Interesting to note, that it was almost only art work there; I might be wrong but I don’t recall any other company or organization that would present something else than their hard-core technologies.

The artwork was beautiful, and also beautifully useless, creating a nice contrast to other, all-too-important-and-socially-relevant concepts that were galore at the congress. It’s not that I don’t value ‘useful’ things; I do. But it is unfortunately too often when new technologies are employed to solve the old problems, or to re-create already known products and applications, which doesn’t leave them a chance to demonstrate their true potential. Apparently purposeless, yet beautiful and inspirational art work can be a great way to open these hidden qualities of new technologies, and new ideas in general (and in this context I really like the efforts by Philips to support these experimentations in its Lumiblade Creative Lab.

There were ‘serious things’ at the stand too: new energy efficient lamps, new interactive solutions for homes and streets. But I think that emotionally people had been moved most by the nice and playful wall of light plates. Like the first time, I also made a short movie about the installation, just to show a type of interaction it allows for.

I’ve already written here about the events I visited during last ten days or so – about PICNIC, and the ICT congress in Brussels; ok, ‘wrote’ is perhaps too big a word for what I did so far, it’s better to call these small postings announcements. And didn’t even mention the Museum Night in Van Abbemuseum (presented as a Yellow Circle on the above picture). I do want, and will write more, later. But before going into details of each individual event I would like to reflect on this, rather strange, week in general.

It was indeed tense, dense, full of events and impressions a week; each of them was great: informative, inspirational, ‘useful’. Yet together they created a rather bizarre cocktail, a somewhat strange feeling of detachment and elevation, a point of view that exceeds each individual scope. Cartographically it can be understood as a bird-view projection where the details of each location are somewhat distorted, even lost, but the total picture all of a suddenly gains a depth, and obtains additional layers of meaning.

I spent three days traveling to Amsterdam to PICNIC, a large annual gathering of the creatives of all sorts, but also of technology people, business people, media people (and of just-people too). Plenty of events, talks, new ideas, the whole place was a vibe. I then went to the opening of the next round of the Play program in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (combined with Museum Night); I consider this museum one of the most original in Europe (can’t really comment on the global scale, but pretty sure it would perform well there too). It always exceeds and transgress the boundaries – of art, of its role in society, or the ways to show art.

Then I went to the ICT congress in Brussels, further stretching a locational arc to Belgium; again, a massive overload, this time of technological achievements, projects and concepts. Here it was less about art and creativity, and more about hard-core engineering and coding, and the event was greatly complimentary to the previous gatherings.

I then decided to go to the European Conference on Digital Space, also held in Brussels. I somehow thought (wrongly) that this event is an extension, or a satellite gathering next to the above ICT congress. This last event had to happen on September 29, in – guess, where? – the European Parliament.

I manages to miss all the news about the coming protests against ‘austerity measures’, so the news from the radio when I was driving to Brussels took me by surprise. I was driving to the very epicenter of the demonstrations, and to the very place these demonstrations have been targeted to, the EC/EU buildings (ironically, I also forgot my phone, so I wasn’t even able to warn people, in case of something nasty happening).

The city looked pretty surreal; entire center was blocked, so I had to park in the outskirts and walked to the center; sci-fi looking police was everywhere, with armored vehicles and barbed wire installations. The flow of people looked both threatening and festive. Bright multicolored robes and flags were creating an atmosphere of a nice carnival of some sort; the sounds of grenades were wiping it, and the next wave of demostrators in even more colorful costumes was reinstalling it once again. I can’t remember when I listened to the International last time; strong flashbacks of the Soviet times were occurring all the time.

Finally I got the Parliament, almost an hour later than expected; and then I spent another hour fighting with all the bureaucracies to get the pass (and I was a ‘press’, not an average visitor). The situation was getting more and more surreal, a mix of apparently important policy-making, amazing omnipresent bureaucracy, and a total hollowness of any activities in these glass-and-steel EU castles, that were in such a striking, almost absurd disconnect with what was happening on the streets.

The bottom image is not from the streets of Brussels; it was from terrible car accident I witnesses on my way home, somewhere near the Dutch border. A gas container has apparently exploded, paralyzing the highway for more than two hours. One can read this whole chain of events as a ‘deep symbolism’, or as a ‘cheap symbolism’, or lack of any symbolism whatsoever. It definitely entangles my own thoughts and feelings of the later time, and perfectly illustrates the context in which Summ()n operates.