summ( )n

I haven’t yet posted any pictures from the Glow festival of light in Eindhoven, and this is my first attempt to recover the situation. This year’s program is very interesting, it’s perhaps smaller than in the previous years, or may be simply more compact and better integrated into the city. At least I don’t experience such fragmentation and arbitrariness as before.

This particular project, called Rejoice in the Lamb, by Michel Suk, is located in the St. Catharina Church, and combines a stunning contemporary lighting installation with a deeply spiritual vocal music performance. Such a strange cocktail of the futures and the pasts creates an interesting time-looping sensation.

There is short video on their site, but I am afraid it does not convey this experience very well. We’ve been there together with about three hundred other people, inside of this bizarre kaleidoscope, which was quite an elevating experience.

In my previous posting about the Ideefiks seminar I wrote that ‘design does not exist’ (as if it is a common knowledge), and only then realized that I used this phrase in the presentation that I didn’t describe here – yet. In my own mind the sentence is almost a cliche by now, yet it’s not even present in this ‘blogging space’; a typical case of the ‘futures not evenly distributed’. Time to catch up with the mind’s futurescapes.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to speak at a mini-conference titled Blow Up the Cover Up, which itself was a ‘back cover’ of a week-long program Tricksters Tricked in the Vanabbe Museum in Eindhoven. Speaking broadly, the program was about different strategies of identity (de)construction, and included a range of art installations, performances and interventions.

For the last event of the program Hadas Zemer and Freek Lomme, its co-curators, invited Michel de Boer, identity designers from Rotterdam and Jonas Staal, a Dutch artist-activist (who also participated in the art program with his new project Art/Property of Politics). In some sense, they couldn’t select two more polar presenters: Michel represented a classical design approach to identity creation (he created a large number of designs for both businesses and governmental organizations alike; every person in the Netherlands knows at least one of his creations, identity design of the country’s police cars). Lately he’s been also involved in numerous design projects abroad, for example, he helps to design ‘identity’ for an entire country of South Korea.

Jonas makes his art to mix, re-mix, confuse and eventually blow up existing identity structures. In his presentation he told about his most recent project, Post Propaganda (pdf 1, pdf 2), where he explores art potential of political posters, and political power of art provocation.

The conference’s program also announced a third participant, described as a ‘mystery speaker’. Well, as I have suddenly discovered just a few days before the conference, it was me. I was supposed to present something that would “elevate the discussion to another dimension” (phew!) /me is always ready to elevate something to another dimension, as a matter of fact.

But the guys invited me (perhaps deliberately) so shortly before the talk that I hardly had any time to prepare anything thoughtful. Plus, I was actually very busy with preparing our own game about Cities of Happiness), so I was almost forced to be spontaneous and improvise full-steam. The slides were inevitably prepared in a rush, and the story is very raw, so I treat it as a stub, and plan to work it out further later.

I decided not to tell a grand story, with a predefined meaning and ‘morale’, but instead play a mini-game, to show a few (visual) pieces, out of which the audience could assemble their own ‘puzzle’. Since the theme of the conference was about identity and its (mis)(re)presentations, I also decided to make my story a bit auto-biographical and self-referential. In case of my readers’ interest, the slides can be now seen on SlideShare (click the picture below); I added a few notes to otherwise entirely pictorial presentation.

NB: I was later told that my story is way too complex to tell in 20 or so min I was given, and that it should be split into 6-7 different stories, each of 20-30 slides. But I tend to think that it was not so bad, especially for the stub executed in a mystery speech genre. Next time better (or rather more mysterious).

Last Friday I went to the Ideefiks Lustrum seminar held by the Center for Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Science (CEPTES) of the University of Twente. I learned about the event via my recent Facebook ‘friendship’ with Peter-Paul Verbeek, the Center’s director (and it was a pleasure to meet and thank him in person at the event). I didn’t know all the background behind the gathering, but as I discovered it was a celebration of the Center’s 25th anniversary, and quite a memory-able event, with a lot of alumni members of the center in the audience.

Despite the importance and Big Number date, the seminar’s atmosphere was quite homey, almost intimate. I guess, the majority of the people there knew each other, and most likely for years – which also meant that the debates and discussions may go bit deeper than at an average conference of that kind. The first presentation was by Søren Riis, Danish philosopher currently affiliated with Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. His talk was about Martin Heidegger, and how his ideas can help us to better understand the future of… biotechnology (!) (the ‘ultimate technology’ of the future, as believed by Søren.

It was a very thoughtful talk, the one that requires more serious thinking than the average powerpoint slideshow implies. I can’t agree with some of the Søren’s arguments, to discuss some others I would need to (re-)read both Heidegger’s work and some other texts, but in general it was a very thought-provoking presentation. I took the pictures of almost all of his slides, and in case of interest the readers of this blog can find them in my set on Flickr (Ideefix Seminar) .

The second presentation was by Peter-Paul Verbeek; he wasn’t supposed to talk, and had to replace Arie Rip at the last moment.

But I personally think it was excellent a replacement! (Don’t want to say anything bad about Arie, I am sure his story would be great too, but I found the P-P V’s take most appropriate for such an event.) It was an excellent overview of the evolution of approaches (‘turns’, as he called them) in the philosophy of technology during last 25 or so years. A very informative story, also concluded by his views of ‘what’s next’. According to the speaker, the next turn after the ‘ethical’ one will be ‘anthropological’, with a focus on ‘accompanying technology’ rather than ‘assessing’ it. I was in particular delighted with the request to reflect on the role of design in this whole process (and of course I couldn’t resist to share my ‘insider information’ about design, the fact that in fact ‘design doesn’t exist’ . Which lead to an interesting – albeit short – discussion about the role of philosophy for the discipline of future studies.

The last presentation, by Hedwig te Molder from the Wageningen University was, well, interesting, yes, but not so refreshing for me; I just knew quite well the subject she was talking, discourse analysis (of the communities, in her case). For me that was a daily life for many years in the past, moreover, I also saw the problems (or rather ‘issues’) with this approach when applied in real-life business situations. But it was good story anyway, and nicely complementing the other two.

All in all, a great afternoon, and a lot of food for thought. We also discuss with P-P V that I may come one day, and present one of my own stories, for example, about exploring possible futures by design, in a form of guest lecture.

I wrote about Caviar Rouge Forum, one of the projects by the Caravan Culture agency I was involved (albeit in a minor way, I was just a member of a panel discussing the concept of ‘design-mindedness’). This time it was a much bigger project, a game we designed specially for the project, and played in the premises of Vanabbe Museum in Eindhoven. Instead of just talking about the impact of (national) culture on design, and design – as a discipline and a mindset – on cultures, we suggested to play (with) these ideas and to act them out in a tangible format.

We suggested for the participants (who were both from the Caviar Rouge’s team and the general public; the event was openbaar, public in Dutch) to imagine that they represent different national design team, and from this role to construct a City of Happiness for a imaginary client. We proposed to play with four teams, quite archetypical but also appropriate for the given context: the Chinese, Dutch, Russian, and US ones (we made an effort to not include real Russians in the ‘Russian Team, and likewise, there were no Dutchmen in the “Dutch Team”).

Each team was tasked to design and construct their concept of ‘Happy City” on the given plot of land (we used a beautiful film from the book by Petra Kempf (You Are the City) as a representation of such land). Each team has a set of construction materials (although different for every team, both in quality and quantity), and also some ‘game currency’ to purchase more in due course. Every team has started with heated debates on the meaning of ‘Happiness’ according to the ‘national identity’ which quickly followed with the first sketching/sculpting exercises.

Perhaps, we were to generous game masters, and provided more materials than necessary to the teams, since they didn’t show much interest in the additional supplies and auctions; but there were sporadic exchanges between the teams, including open barters and more hidden appropriations of the poorly overseen resources (e.g., paper cuts).

At the end all the teams presented their ideas, and pretty impressive ones given very limited amount of time they all had (the game lasted just a bit longer than an hour). The ‘Dutch team” (played mostly by Russians) presented their concept of the Soul City, arguing that the key components of happiness is High Spirituality, Natural Beauty, Friendship and Openness (symbolized by various circles, bridges, and flowers).

The “Russian team” (played mostly by Dutch guys) emphasized an importance of History and Roots, and Openness to the Others (you can find a lot of gates and windows in their design).

The ‘Chinese team’ was all about Harmony and Feng-Shui (yet they also accumulated the largest resources of gold in their vault, guarded by the Golden Dragon).

(not so) Surprisingly enough, the winner who took it all was the ‘US team’; not only their concept was seen as the most ‘authentically American’, but they also presented it with wit and self-irony.

The game was concluded with an interesting discussion, and at the end was the best combo of fun and useful learning (as supposed for a ‘serious game’). I plan to make a more detailed presentation, a mini-report of some sort about the game, and will place it later to SlideShare. I also have a few video-clips, to be also incorporated into this report.