5/6 rambling paraphrased summaries of the talks given at the Under Tomorrow’s Sky public think tank, June 16th in MU. Each speaker introduced their ideas for the workshop session on the 17th, which will shape the model city for the exhibition.
Warren Ellis
Just survived having his face shot full of drugs and worked over with cow horns, it’s a miracle he’s even alive. Fortunately Bruce Sterling brought the cure-all and he has adequately self-medicated. May be somewhat more flushed & puffy than usual.
Warren has nothing prepared due to his adventures in British dental surgery, but explains he’s probably here because he wrote a thing called Transmetropolitan. Considers we’re here to do what fiction shouldn’t do. Fiction is there to ask questions, but we’re presumably in persuit of answers. In this we must tread carefully. The session is opened up to Q&A.
Juha asks where Warren lives. The short answer is Southend on Sea. The long answer involves a treatise on the seat of Saxon kings, the growth of cities as cancers, how Western culture works like a car thats kind of reliable but needs kicking before it goes, and ends in concluding that “cities have become machines for keeping us alive just that little bit longer”.
Which brings us to the first point, that the weather is not our friend. “What is the legal status of the weather?” Warren asks. Every 5 or 6 years it rains for AN ENTIRE FUCKING YEAR. Not only a depressing nuisance but the minor floods, landslides, and other dangers to our infrastructure are an actual threat condition. What happens when we just dump the weather off onto our neighbors like Moscow did to ensure neat parades back in the 60′s?
Bruce asks if the city in Transmet is like an ideal now. Despite the gunfire and riots and whatnot Warren isn’t too bothered by the situation there, and doesn’t see it as dystopian. “It’s not so bad” he says, it comes off as a dystopia, really it’s just how we’re already living writ large. “So where would you want to live?” Bruce asks, “Some place where the weather can be controlled” says Warren, Bruce: “No I mean like, contemporary. Copenhagen?” “No, I ran out of there both screaming and yawning.” Warren thumbs down for you, Copenhagen. He likes Reykjavic though, plenty of sun as you would obviously be there in summer. It’s small, but very much a city of the people rather than things faceless.
Vancouver is nice too apparently. The Global Frequency TV pilot was shot there as are a lot of other shows, because Vancouver looks like every major American city without being any of them. You can drive 10 minutes out of town and then there’s forest separating the small towns that all still look like the American ideal of a small town, which in actual America has pretty much ceased to exist. Remember Stargate SG1? Every alien planet on that show (and many others) is shot within 30 minutes of Vancouver.
A follow up asking which historical city would be ok to inhabit leads us to a brief rant on archaeoacoustics, and the question ”Why dont we design cities with sound?” We don’t design cities either to reflect or absorb sound, they are loud and acoustically ugly, and there’s just no reason for it. It’s a failure of imagination.
So how about that Russian with the petrol-powered leaping boots? They may not be that good for the city but they sure as shit are more fun than the Segway. Remember a few months before that came out? A group of high powered Silicon valley types were invited out to to a Dean Kamen garden party and they all came back raving about how what they had seen would define the future of transportation, change the way cities are designed. Then when this world changing invention was unveiled it was the fucking Segway. Now mostly transportation for twats and tourists. Oh, and of course George Bush. ”The future of the city died with George Bush falling off a segway.”
Are we designing a future city or are we designing a future city state? What what about the neighbors if we’re fucking with the weather? Should the state be entirely self sufficient? The muttering becomes incomprensible. There are more questions and there is much stabbing of air with cigarette.
Liam asks about role of Science Fiction. It has always been a tool with which to examine our present day condition, Warren says. Making predictions isn’t the point of the exercise but a side effect. The broader social aspects of the investigations executed through Science Fictional universes are lost on those who are disappointed by so called predictions that didn’t come to pass.
Simon asks if we’re not missing a trick by sidelining dystopias and just focusing on positive developments as is one of the trends in Science Fiction? Warren responds that you can’t ever really get rid of them, as one mans dystopia isn’t the others. A previously stated dystopias are often just our present condition writ large. If you dont like it then by all means don’t look out the window. And what is this positive Scifi stuff really anyway? What is positive? Heinlein often gets cited as being inspirational and exemplary, but he’s really not that optimistic about people. This misreading of Science Fiction doesn’t get us anywhere.
Juha asks about the militarisation of cities, what with the olympic rooftop missiles and drones etc. “Ah yes, now there’s a throwback” says Warren. The idea of Big Brother may come from Britain but in truth they’re a bit shit at it. If the roof missiles are ever launched, the main effect will be that the building is set on fire. Then, if they intercept their target, a cloud of burning shrapnel travelling 4/500 miles an hour will rain down a over suburban area, killing more than just any terrorist missile might have. So yeah it’s a concern, but in Britain you can only laugh because its so crap. It’s theater. Very expensive theater.
Drones on the other hand are more interesting but why aren’t more people thinking about how they can be used for public good? For example a swarm could constantly be collecting atmospheric data over the city. Maybe if we have enough of them they could heat the place up a little.
“I don’t even need an orbital death ray, I will take the low altitude local version.”
Under Tomorrows Sky opens August 10th at MU in Eindhoven.
Opening #UTS think tank 6/6 – Bruce Sterling
6/6 rambling paraphrased summaries of the talks given at the Under Tomorrow’s Sky public think tank, June 16th in MU. Each speaker introduced their ideas for the workshop session on the 17th, which will shape the model city for the exhibition.
Bruce Sterling
Self proclaimed “basic network society dilettante”. No introduction should even be necessary. Deliverable for this project is a story set in the city to be outlined the next day.
So that’s the Leap Motion. Like most of us Bruce was skeptical about this video after first seeing it, but his colleagues at Wired checked it out and it’s legit. Volumetric technology being sold as a game controller as that’s the surest way to get their money back. The potential applications of this device are huge.
When we’re talking about 3D architectural cyberspaces we’ve got to move beyond the superficial visual aspects and ask deeper questions. Who are building these spaces? Why are they building them, what problems are we trying to solve?
The problem the Leap technology potentially solves is registration, an issue core to the success of Augmented Reality. There have been 6 or 7 ways tried to solve this previously, none of which actually really work. They just produce these annoying kind of MS Clippy like entities that jitter around on screen.
That video is based on a Kinect hack. The Leap has 200x better resolution than Kinect, though unfortunately it only registers within a small box of space. Assuming this limitation will be overcome, what would a city be like if it was mapped out in 3d on micrometer scale?” If we can watch & map everything, what would that mean? What happens if we strap one of these onto a seagull? Or all of them? Eventually you’d have a model of the city so good you could just print out another city. It has more weird implications than we can figure out. The city should definitely mash up this idea with others like Rachels.
And now, neologisms! What do we call this new space? Interspace? Predator Lidar? Bruce rattles off a long list of name, some names are actually already in use, others are made up, it’s up to us to spot the differences. My terrible note taking couldn’t keep up but fortunately part of the list has since been posted up on Beyond the Beyond:
Under Tomorrows Sky opens August 10th at MU in Eindhoven.