Academics Journalism Publishing Speculations Travel Writing
by Justin
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Venture Ethnography 2: excerpts & anchors
photo credit: justinpickard (incorporating Andreas Pizsa, Barry M, and the Seattle Municipal Archives)
Following last week’s introduction to Project Cascadia (and accompanying reading list), I thought I’d share a couple of passages that have been firmly lodged in my brain this week.
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First, the very beginning of Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, an extraordinary novel-slash-history of Soviet cybernetics. In this extract, the author grapples with some of the peculiarities and nuance of his writing:
‘This is not a novel. It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story; only the story is the story of an idea, first of all, and only afterwards, glimpsed through the chinks of the idea’s fate, the story of the people involved. The idea is the hero. It is the idea that sets forth, into a world of hazards and illusions, monsters and transformations, helped by some of those it meets along the way and hindred by others.’
– Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (2010), p. 3.
(‘The idea is the hero.‘ How do you approach a biography of an idea? An idea of a region; a utopia; shared – at some vague, subconscious level – by millions of people? Approached obliquely … glimpsed through gaps, and attacked from strange angles? Ambushed with some strange hybrid of fact and fiction? Hmm.)
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Secondly, a couple of lines from Wild Bill Gibson’s ‘The Gernsback Continuum‘; a meditation on legacy futures in the form of a short story:
‘She was talking about those odds and ends of ‘futuristic’ Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing: the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she wanted me to photograph them for her.’
– William Gibson, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, Burning Chrome (1988), pp. 38-39.
(‘Segments of a dreamworld.’ Hunting traces … gathering evidence … detective work, pinning down the imaginary and the nebulous in something tangible. The process of documenting the imaginary drives Gibson’s photojournalist protagonist to the brink of madness, as he begins to slip sideways into the obsolete retro-future he’s been sent to document. It’s an excellent short story, and a key insipiration for some of my earliest work on this project.)
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photo credit: justinpickard
And, finally, the opening lines from Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, a strange, tangential, and exhaustively-referenced biography of Los Angeles:
‘The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future. Standing on the sturdy cobblestone foundations of the General Assembly Hall of the Socialist city of Llana del Rio – Open Shop Los Angeles’s utopian antipode – you can sometimes watch the Space Shuttle in its elegant final descent towards Rogers Dry Lake.’
– Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990), p. 3.
(‘From the ruins of its alternative future.‘ If you want to understand the ways things will turn out, you have to understand what’s already failed, and why? These are words that echo (rhyme with?) Sterling’s oft-repeated aphorism: ‘The ruins of the unsustainable are the twenty-first century’s frontier.’ The mission, then, is to locate sites where the past and future collide with an unexpected ferocity, bringing long-buried cultural detritus to the surface. Atemporality, located in space.)
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More to follow, in time.
Academics Politics/Economics Publishing Travel Writing
by Justin
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Venture Ethnography 1: a bi(bli)ography
photo credit: justinpickard (incorporating Andreas Pizsa, Barry M, and the Seattle Municipal Archives)
Venture ethnography | Speculative travel writing | Territorial futures
Introducing Project Cascadia: my attempt to bootstrap a new(ish) mode of writing into existence.
3–6 weeks in North America’s Pacific Northwest, in search of traces of Cascadia. Fodder for a series of essays and investigations. Presented in a book. Crowdfunded by you; the proud and attractive people of the internet.
For the tl;dr among you, there’s a an easy blurb and video here – enough to you give you a sense of the shape of the thing. Go, chuckle at my unkempt appearance and poor grasp of audio syncing!
Then, for more in the way of detail (a lot more), join me below…
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Project Cascadia is the test-case for a cluster of ideas I’ve been playing with for the best part of five years. A chance to break out my signature obsessions …
Hauntings, world expos, gonzo journalism, science fiction, systems, geopolitics, utopianism, virtuality, globalisation, the sublime, resilience, collapsonomics, aesthetics, architecture, environmentalism, infrastructure, design, futures studies, sovereignty, atemporality, risk, the nation-state, the uncanny, Americana, technoscience, cyberpunk, multispecies ethnography, fiction, capitalism, the human senses, counterfactual history, media and cyborgs (and media cyborgs)
… and nail them to the mast of a weird and interstitial sort of boat; a soupy, hybrid writing practice that would combine the best of ethnography, journalism and science fiction.
Trips to San Francisco (2009), Iceland (2010), and Dublin (2011) demonstrated my incapability of approach travel in any kind of ‘normal’ way. A born infovore, I kept getting caught up in the minutae, symbolism, and historical specificity of the place, and ended up ambushing tour guides with questions about medieval property law and taking lots of photos of construction hoardings.
Part of this is down to a strange education, with a joint honours degree in Anthropology and International Relations (blending the local and the global), and a masters in Digital Media.
Both of these programmes allowed me the freedom to shoehorn in all kinds of stuff, adding science fiction to offshore finance; american literature to biotechnology; and penning essays on the aesthetics of Guantanamo Bay, the Principality of Sealand, airports, post-colonial Mumbai, and Richard Kelly’s cult masterpiece/traversty Southland Tales (2007).
In lieu of a biography, then, I’m offering a bibliography. Five years of my brain, in books, articles, essays, and blog posts. I fully expect this to be a forest of broken links by this time next week, but, in the meantime, it should begin to give you an idea of where I stand … and, yes, why I might be doing this.
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Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983)
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996)
‘Spectral housing and urban cleansing: notes on millennial Mumbai‘, Public Culture 12:3 (2000)
Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1992)
J. G. Ballard, Vermillion Sands (1971)
‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island‘ (Guardian podcast)
Richard Barbrook, Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village (2007)
Nigel Barley, The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes From a Mud Hut (1983)
Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991)
America (1986)
Lauren Beukes, Zoo City (2010)
Moxyland (2008)
Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991)
Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (2006)
John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
Jamais Cascio, ‘Legacy Futures‘, Open the Future (2008)
‘Three Possible Economic Models‘, Fast Company (2009)
‘Three Possible Economic Models, Part 2‘, Fast Company (2009)
Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston (1975)
Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends (2008)
Jean and John Comaroff, ‘Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants and Millennial Capitalism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101:4 (2002)
‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming‘, Public Culture 12:2 (2000)
‘Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony’, American Ethnologist 26:2 (1999)
Douglas Coupland, ‘A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years‘, Globe and Mail (2010)
Generation A (2009)
JPod (2006)
Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (2004)
Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990)
Cory Doctorow, Makers (2009)
Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (2005)
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)
Warren Ellis, Shivering Sands (2009)
Matthew Gandy, ‘Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City‘, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29:1 (2005)
Bradley L. Garrett, ‘Urban explorers: quests for myth, mystery and meaning’, Geography Compass (2010) [video]
Place Hacking (2008-present)
William Gibson, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, Burning Chrome (1986)
Zero History (2010)
Spook Country (2007)
Pattern Recognition (2003)
David Graeber, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (2007)
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004)
Adam Greenfield, ‘Thoughts for an eleventh September: Alvin Toffler, Hirohito, Sarah Palin‘, Speedbird (2008)
Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (2010)
Charlie Hailey, Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space (2009)
Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (2007)
Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™ (1997)
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1990)
Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (2009)
Dan Hill, ‘The Street as Platform‘, City of Sound (2008)
Drew Jacob, ‘How to be ExPoMod‘, Most Interesting People in the Room
Sarah Kember, ‘Media, Mars and Metamorphosis‘, Culture Machine (2010)
Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002)
Alan Klima, ‘Spirits of ‘Dark Finance’: A Local Hazard for the International Moral Fund’, Cultural Dynamics (2006)
‘Thai Love Thai: Financing Emotion in Post-crash Thailand‘, Ethnos (2004)
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1991)
Ursula Le Guin, Changing Planes (2003)
The Disposessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)
Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)
Geoff Manaugh, The BLDGBLOG Book (2009)
Ian McDonald, The Dervish House (2010)
Brasyl (2007)
River of Gods (2004)
Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004)
China Mieville, The City & the City (2009)
‘Covehithe‘, The Guardian (2011)
‘M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire – Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?‘, Collapse IV (2008)
‘Floating Utopias‘, In These Times (2007)
Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (2002)
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Keith Roberts, Pavane (1968)
Jim Rossignol, This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities (2008)
Geoff Ryman, Air (2005)
Stephen Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (2010)
Gary Shtenyngart, Super Sad True Love Story (2010)
Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (2010)
Bruce Sterling, The Caryatids (2009)
‘Designer Futurescape‘, Make 18 (2009)
‘Dispatches from the Hyperlocal Future‘, Wired (2007)
Holy Fire (1996)
Islands in the Net (1988)
‘State of the World, 20––‘, The Well (2001-present)
Michael Taussig, What Color is the Sacred? (2009)
‘Zoology, Magic, and Surrealism in the War on Terror‘, Critical Inquiry 34:S2 (2008)
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
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There you go; everything interesting and/or relevant I’ve read in the last half-decade. *jazz hands*
In the second part of this cynically self-promotional series, to follow sometime in the next week, I’ll start to weave some of the items from this list into something more useful and cohesive, and begin looking at what this hybrid form of writing might actually look like. Join me then.
Academics Cartesian Minefield Design Politics/Economics Speculations Technology
by Justin
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Scenius Engineering?
Scenius:
‘Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”‘
– Kevin Kelly, ‘Scenius, or Communal Genius‘, The Technium, 10/06/2008
Engineering:
‘Scientists try to understand nature. Engineers try to make things that do not exist in nature. Engineers stress invention. To embody an invention the engineer must put his idea in concrete terms, and design something that people can use. That something can be a device, a gadget, a material, a method, a computing program, an innovative experiment, a new solution to a problem, or an improvement on what is existing. Since a design has to be concrete, it must have its geometry, dimensions, and characteristic numbers.’
– YC Fung and P. Tong, 2001, Classical and Computational Solid Mechanics
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Key texts include the work of Steven Johnson, Joseph Schumpeter, Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, the ‘soft’ architecture of Cedric Price and Archigram, the as-of-yet-unwritten obituary of East London Tech City, and any amount of behavioural economics. Organisational acupuncture. An architecture of micropolitics.
It might even be a career.
Kick the Bastards Out: Comparative Collapsonomics
A half-day before the curiously satisfying flag-waving and champagne cork ballistics of the Saxe-Coburg-Middletons, I popped up to London to have a chat with Dougald Hine about my travels in Iceland and Ireland, financial collapse, and why – on reflection – AV is probably a good thing. The audio from this conversation is now up, both on the New Public Thinking website, and here:
I’ve shoehorned the accompanying slidehow in below, which should help shed a little light on the issues. Hopefully. Let me know how you get on.
Cartesian Minefield Design Material/Digital Pop Culture Speculations Technology Visual Culture
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TV On The Radio: ‘Will Do’
As a brother-in-arms to that last post, I give you Dugan O’Neal‘s video for ‘Will Do‘, from TV On The Radio’s latest album, ‘Nine Kinds of Light‘:
Design fiction in the service of art rock, and a killer example of cyborg sensoria. Splendid stuff.
‘Song of the Machine’
On the vanishingly slight possibility that you missed my triumphant/shell-shocked showboating; a nifty short film on optogenetic retinal prostheses, starring my face:
More details and lively behind-the-scenes action over on the Superflux blog.
[future shock] The Future of Relationships
Tonight, from 2100 GMT, Guy Yeomans and I will be co-chairing an hour-long Twitter discussion on the future of relationships.
Hosted by the Association of Professional Futurists on Twitter, the ‘Futrchat’ format is a monthly, open, multi-party conversation on a specific topic: usually, ‘the future of X’. Guy has already posted our list of questions for this month, but I wanted to supplement this with a couple of clips and links to get you thinking.
First, a clip from the opening titles of Brit-director Michael Winterbottom’s ambient sci-fi romance Code 46 (2003):
On the ‘sufficiently advanced technology’ front, from that same film, Winterbottom introduces the notion of an ‘empathy virus’. Of dubious plausibility, sure, but one hell of a wild card:
For a bitingly satirical, compelling, and ultimately heartbreaking vision of romance across the generation gap, I can enthusiastically recommend Gary Shtenyngart’s 2010 novel, Super Sad True Love Story. Check out this extract, hosted over at Nerve:
“I volunteer at a refugee shelter near the train station,” Eunice said, apropos of something.
“You do? That’s so fantastic!”
“You’re such a nerd.” She laughed cruelly at me.
“What?” I said. “I’m sorry.” I laughed too, just in case it was a joke, but right away I felt hurt.
“LPT,” she said. “TIMATOV. ROFLAARP. PRGV. Totally PRGV.”
The youth and their abbreviations. I pretended like I knew what she was talking about. “Right,” I said. “IMF. PLO. ESL.”
She looked at me like I was insane. “JBF,” she said.
“Who’s that?” I pictured a tall Protestant man.
“It means I’m ‘just butt-fucking’ with you. Just kidding, you know.”
On the subject of surveillance, privacy, and group psychology, I tend to roll this one out with alarming frequency. We Live in Public (2009):
And, finally, from the fine folks at Intel, a pdf of Scarlett Thomas’ excellent short story, ‘The Drop‘. Great attention to detail, with a real eye for the social and personal impacts of ubiquitous computing and the internet-of-things.
So, that should be enough to keep you guys ticking over until tonight. Hope to see you there!
Built Environment Material/Digital Politics/Economics Science! Speculations Technology [future shock] [key texts]
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[key texts / future shock] Cities on the Edge
If you’re reading this, you need to lay your hands on a copy of Transhuman Space: Cities on the Edge. I’ve written previously on my appreciation of the weight and seriousness of the Transhuman Space setting, and this particular supplement, from science writer Waldemar Ingmar and polymath-transhumanist Anders Sandberg, is no exception.
Razor-sharp futurism, sketching the possible shape developments in architecture, infrastructure, and urban culture over the next century, including a plausibly surreal vision of Stockholm, circa 2100.
93 pages. $12.99. Includes the phrases, ‘Beyond advances in life extension, uploading could in principle allow an ageless posthuman monarch’ and ‘The Nuiwhare Heretaunga arcology outside Hastings, New Zealand, was constructed in 2058 as a Maori cultural community.’ High-quality brain food. Recommended.
(That said, I’m slightly concerned to see the best futures work being smuggled into popular culture through RPG supplements — what would Stuart Candy say?)
Design Material/Digital Real Life Science! Technology Writing
by Justin
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Cyborgs, Cascadia, Capitalism, Superstruct, Superflux
It’s been a busy couple of months. In anticipation of a potential September return to London, I’d scheduled a marathon series of pints with interesting people, in the hope of reverse engineering a way to make enough money for rent, food, and a speedy internet connection. It seems to have gone well, and – as a result – I’m feeling a lot less fight-or-flightish about the prospect of a looming adulthood.
Roughly simultaneously, I’ve also been working with post-disciplinary design company Superflux; levering my newfound knowledge of cyborg anthropology to help with a project about (dis)ability and the post/transhuman sensorium. Here’s their enigma-drenched summary:
‘Between that, we are prototyping a series of ideas for our new Lab project titled ‘Song of the Machine‘, a mind-boggling optogenetics/neuroscience project in partnership Dr. Patrick Degenaar, Newcastle University and Dr. Anders Sandberg. This is a long-term project with different design aspects. But for now, our first short piece (to be done in less then 4 weeks!) is commissioned by the Science Gallery, Dublin, for their upcoming exhibition HUMAN+ The Future of our Species. Super exciting!’
It is, at that; and includes a trip to Ireland in mid-April – the perfect opportunity to collect some more material for a personal project on collapsonomics and European electoral politics.
In the meantime, some reading …
By me; hosted elsewhere:
- How should I design a trans-continental leisurely road-trip to maximize “literary potential”? [Quora; the seeds of what I'm tentatively naming 'Operation Cascadia']
- Counterfactual Confessional [Storify]
- Life Map, version 0.1 [Flickr]
By other people:
- “It’s not a war, it’s a rescue mission” [m1k3y, grinding.be]
- Nuclear Counterinsurgency [Nick Mirzoeff, For the Right to Look]
- How Social Movements Happen (and part two) [Seb Paquet, Emergent Cities]
- Revolution from the Edge [John Hagel, Edge Perspectives]
- On Public Objects: Connected Things And Civic Responsibilities In The Networked City [Adam Greenfield, Cognitive Cities]
- Closing Keynote, IXDA 11 [Bruce Sterling]
- The Future is Here Today, and it’s Superdense [Scott Smith, Changeist]
- New Europe: The life of a German family [Stuart Jefferies, The Guardian]
- On the Very Idea of a Super-Swarm [Dr David Roden, enemyindustry]
Design Politics/Economics Visual Culture [future shock]
by Justin
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[future shock] WOPPWOW
I don’t even know where to begin with this one.
Gear Queer + Favela Chic? Brazenly ‘of the Zeitgeist,’ yet lo-fi and kind of understated. Bonus marks for Bowie and Google Earth.
And, once you’ve adjusted your brain, there’s even a website.
(via Rory Hyde and Emile Zile)
