18.7.19 Chalémie, Messidor, 227

I spoke at the #UALPlatform on Networked Making last week. It was a really nice event and I got to meet some new people and catch up with some folks I've known a little while. I spoke about the models of the world that the university and the subject have and how they interact awkwardly and maybe poorly respond to each other sometimes. I made a short video to sum up the hypothesis which people enjoyed.

The slides from my talk and some of the others are up here and you can check those out.

The blog of my talk from the Design Futures meetup is still doing the rounds which is cool. It seems to have struck a resonance with people which makes me feel like it was a worthwhile thing to do so I'll try and keep writing up talks even though I have less and less to do with speculative design. Despite that less and lessness I did an interview with old friends at speculative.edu following on from the talk. It's a tricky tihng to talk about because I don't really have strong feelings about speculative design either way, I just find it concerning how strong other people's feelings are about it. I guess that's why I don't come across as particularly serious. Some quotes:

there’s the reasonable critique that the canon of Speculative Design ends up in galleries or on post-it notes. That seems pretty accurate. I would struggle to come up with more than a dozen speculative projects that weren’t either laundering corporate irresponsibility through the medium of post-it notes or inaccessible gallery work. 

As for reclaiming it … I don’t know, why bother? It broadened the capabilities of design, it brought new relationships and tools and perhaps that’s enough. There are so many other interesting emerging practices out there that deserve attention. You wouldn’t remake Fawlty Towers, would you?

I've been getting more and more chat correspondence from folks via email and I think that's really cool. Please send me emails of things you're into or just about random little project, it's nice.

Learnings

On Saturday/Sunday I did the Dunwich Dynamo, riding 120 miles overnight form London to the Suffolk coast. I put the whole thing up on Strava and Instagram where most of my bike content is. I documented some of mine and my riding buddy's learnings of that specific process so you can check them out there.

This week I also learned:

1. Quite a lot about 'change management' from a training session I did on Monday, the Kubler Ross model is what people sometimes call the 'seven stages of...' thing. Not sure whether these models reduce complex phenomena or whether phenomena emerge from them. I've totally stopped being skeptical about these types of training things now, I almost always find them super useful and revealing. It's kind of cool to be standoffish about them but they're good opportunities for doing better. 
2. Learnt quite a lot about connectivism from the #UALPlatform including a new physical activity for actually drawing strings together like a giant investigative wall chart. 
3. I don't know if this was new or whether I had forgotten it but cats' meows and purrs are noises they've evolved specifically for humans. They don't miaow or purr at other cats. 

17.4.19 Five Problems with Speculative Design (Pensee, Germinal, 227)

You won't believe these five reasons why speculative design can't save the world

I gave this talk back at the Speculative Futures meet-up in London and it was super interesting. I’ve been teaching and on/off practicing some form of speculative design for years and have settled into an understanding of its limitations. I believe it is an useful research tool, but like any tool it can be used to help and maintain or to exploit and destroy. I’m always a bit vexed by the messiah-like reverence it can be treated with especially by the recent breathlessness it's being dragged up with in UX and design thinking circles. So when I was asked to talk about it at a meet-up aimed at sharing it amongst young professionals I decided to try and articulate some of my concerns about the overstepping of these limitations.

As a caveat, the audience were really great and very engaged in a discussion we had at the end with myself and the other presenter, J-Paul Neeley who was a bit more upbeat but equally wary. Also as another caveat, this talk is riddled with generalisations and broadsides which further confirm my unsubstantive polemical approach towards serious, nuanced discourse.

As another caveat, the audience were amazing the organisers perfect and J-Paul was a goddamn powerhouse of changing my mind, I hope he publishes his talk too.

Anyway, our story begins…

In around 2013 I asked ‘What if? Then what?’ I had been through Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art a few years previously but was seeing the difficulty of speculative design moving beyond the academy or the gallery. It seemed that here was a useful technique but it was struggling to translate provocation to meaningful change. I was practicing and studying in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis when that particular world of design was seized by the opportunity that the seemingly inevitable collapse of capitalism presented.

However, the last few years have seen speculative design proliferate in a different way, as part of the mainstream of the business of design - as service to profit and narrow definitions of 'good' and consequently reinforcing the very thing it was conceived of to critique. I’m going to deliver my worries about this trend in the form of five conceits or provocations that sort of flow off one another. They could probably use more thought tbh.

Speculative design seems, in its popular form, has lost its critical dimension. Perhaps my most major criticism is the appropriation of speculative design by the charlatan science of ‘design thinking’ and its deployment as a tool largely used for whitewashing corporate ambition and adding a patina of ‘design research’ to make a convincing argument. I’ve been part of these projects and have seen hundreds of them. Like any fad, the knock-offs quickly follow behind. However, this appropriation has meant that speculative design per-se is divorced from its critical origins. Rather than critiquing and antagonising the underlying institutions and structures that are complicit in the rampant social exploitation, irresponsibility and complacency that threatens the existence of societies, the species and the planet, speculative design used to make them ‘better.’

Speculative design traces its origins to critical design and the broad corpus of critical practice across the social sciences, art and architecture. For me this critical practice elicits an antagonistic confrontation with social exploitation, irresponsibility or complacency in the same way as a good artwork, film or song might. This corpus can most easily be traced to the often-referenced radical movements of the late 1960’s who provided an anathema to the central-planning modernism of most mainstream practice.

Superstudio were one of the most renowned of these practices and their principle, Adolfo Natalini, laid out the critical responsibility of creative practice in a lecture where he said…

Superstudio produced provocative future images of an homogenous global society and the world of it as a way of highlighting the complicity of design culture in the social divisions that were present in the everyday experience of people. They suggested design had a responsibility to challenge, not to serve. Though this approach was biting and is referenced in creative institutes the world over, it was largely inaccessible; design for designers. For most it had no tangible effect and it didn’t connect with policy or social in any tangible way. It became an intellectual practice that created discussion but failed to spill over into the wider political discourse. Dunne and Raby, in their formulation of critical design addressed this issue explicitly:

It's fair to say that the range of projects which have connected more meaningfully and tangibly with publics and policy is greater than in the mid-20th century. There are some great projects that have had distinct effect on policy and informed public discourse. Unfortunately, in doing so, another problem in the speculative design thesis is brought to light.

What I mean here is that speculative design if often used for either dystopia generation or as ways of reinforcing, or, at best, mildly incrementing on current social conditions. There appears to be an unquestioned subtext that the European social democratic notion of 'progress' is preferable and speculative designs are cautionary tales about straying from this path rather than genuinely exploring alternatives.

This has been significantly better explored in the work of Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira, Dr. Ahmed Ansari and the work of the Decolonising Design group amongst others. Discussion between practitioners and theorists in the comments attached on Burton Nitta’s Republic of Salivation project on Design and Violence is illuminating. Here, commentators pointed out the unquestioned political positioning of privilege when designers could work on projects about speculating on starvation while actual starvation was happening and as a seeming glamorisation and cautionary tale about change. A kind of speculative disaster tourism.

Questioning the politics of speculative design as a practice or method is useful because it acknowledges that at least it is a field that has a politics or acknowledges that designers are political actors, which other fields of design are often reluctant to do for fear of becoming activist. Here in Dunne and Raby’s A/B Manifesto we can use the right-hand column to interpret principles of critical (and speculative, if you like) design but what’s more important is the act of comparison itself; the idea that there is a position to be taken when practicing design that needs to be acknowledged. This is something that mainstream design is often reluctant to do.

The manifesto also suggests a questioning of what design is for, what the values of ‘good’ or ‘better’ are when we use these tools for ‘improvement.’ Is ‘better’ more profit? More engagement? More experience? Or is ‘better’ less engagement? Would it actually be better for a person to engage less with your service – to stream less music, to watch less television, to access less information? When using speculative design to ‘improve’ services or products the implicit belief is usually that ‘better’ is equivalent to ‘more.’ Consequently speculative design simply serves to reinforce existing design tendencies rather than question them.

Puling away form the individual design of a product or service its worth questioning how speculative design, as a subset of human-centred design or user experience is most often geared toward the interface of the individual and the organisation – the products and devices that people use rather than the systemic inequalities that inform these designs.

For example, Google and Microsoft in particular produce a good range of speculative design but also fund climate change denial. Design thinkers can cash in all the post-it notes they can get their hands on in an effort to ‘improve’ the products or ‘better’ the user experience but the market imperative of these companies is to maintain a status quo reliant on the exploitation of fossil fuels. Good speculative design in this context would be antagonising these systemic problems rather than targeting the user, which I’ll return to later. Speculative design in the mainstream has largely retreated form these larger questions, not entirely of its own fault; Microsoft and Google would be reluctant to pay the invoices of designers telling them they are destroying the planet.

This is a problem beyond speculative design perhaps and more a problem of design per se, in particular that of human-centred design. In this individualistic mindset, responsibility is the burden of the individual, given under the premise of ‘autonomy.’ This has the effect of atomising collective or social responsibility into information-rich individual bubbles where it’s imperative on the individual to improve themselves at the behest of the organisations making technology.

Think of basically every app ever made. Every app geared toward ‘improvement’ is about changing the lifestyle of the individual in order to conform to the worldview of the organisation producing the app. This precludes a dialogue about why that company are funding climate change denial because, by design, you are at fault for the world’s problems and you need to change. When speculative design is deployed to improve these types of interactions it invariably light-touches on the way the information is delivered or the type of interactions by which it is received. It never attempts to reignite a sense of collective responsibly for change or the spiritual necessity of Earthly survival.

The argument most often used in counter to this idea that, essentially, speculative design is not deployed critically or antagonistically to a point where it has meaningful effect is that of trickle-down. This is the idea that speculative design will influence decision makers and students of design toward more conscientious practices and wider critical consideration. My concern is that this just simply isn’t good enough. We don’t have the time for trickle-down effects or incremental improvement of exploitative organisations.

We don't have a good speculative design for planetary-change. The operating model of the business-design pipeline is exploiting the planet at one end and users at the other. The idea that these might in fact be the same thing would mean admitting that an operational focus on individual users and discrete time windows was ineffective design. And large sprawling change over massive time windows and shifting human/non-human interactions does not conform to the way in which revenue is reported. Again, this isn't the fault of speculative design; designers need to eat. But, under these conditions we can't to look at it as a catch-all solution for planetary collapse.

The idea that there is genuine investment in trickle-down, incremental improvement is not justification enough for light-touch or non-critical practice. And speculative design is toothless as long as the ultra-rich and leading organisations secure themselves against what they admit is an almost inevitable climate and social collapse. There is no more a genuine investment in incremental improvement through design than there is through legislation. Speculative design has failed to achieve the meaningful tools for change that we once hoped for and has instead been co-opted as a white-washing exercise for tech companies who fund climate change denial and buy high-altitude property to escape rising sea levels.

-

I'm away next week so no blog from me unless it's a terrible week and I am so bored that I want to brave blogger's mobile interface. Ha! no.
Tx

12.12.16 The Potential for Radical Politics in Rendering at From Paper to Pixels.

This is the full paper I gave at the From Paper to Pixels; Transmedial Traffic in Architecture Drawing at the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, TU Delft in association with The New Institute, Rotterdam. It's useful in laying out some of my thoughts about rendering as a potential practice for radical imagination. This is the full 3,700 words including the abstract, I've included some of the slides but not all of them. My apologies. 

Abstract

Architectural renders form the cornerstone of public communication in contemporary architecture. New developments are reported and promoted to the public using highly stylised glamorous and romantic renders that conform to the dominant societal values and politics: aspiration, wealth, executive and family lifestyles, urbanism. This consequently results in an homogenous aesthetic. Rendering software and its application works as a self-reciprocating aesthetic style of tropes that reinforce these dominant politics and values. Images of the future reinforce the way that future is developed [Bassett et al. 2013] and so in creating these renders, developers and architects build a narrow and linear vision of the future in line with the values they espouse. In tun, the software is further developed to reinforce these tropes. [Plummer Fernandez 2014]

Because of their dominance, projects of resistance cite these renders as targets. Campaigns attempting to halt redevelopment, gentrification or expensive public-private projects hold up these renders as leitmotif effigy, symbols of the top-down power the renders represent.

However, the growing accessibility and usability of rendering software presents an alternative space for political action. Rather than simply becoming sites of resistance, rendering software has the potential to be a site of radical, critical imagination. As Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams point out in their book ‘Inventing the Future’ - We ‘can’t resist new worlds into being’ [Srnicek & Williams 2015] but we can begin to render new worlds as alternative visions that wildly challenge the dominant hegemony of rendered futures.

Activists and artists have begun to use rendering software as a tool for creating new imaginaries and feeling critical debate about the shaping of the future. Their projects challenge histories, the laws of physics and create sprawling meta-fictions that exceed the abilities of other media. At the same time these projects make tongue-in cheek attacks at the narratives and aesthetics of architectural rendering and dominant power structures.

This paper lays out a brief analysis of the relationship between future imaginaries and the dominant aesthetics of contemporary rendering software and suggests that this software presents a space for developing political imaginaries that can lead change and critical discussion. It uses examples and case studies from theorists and artists working in the space of 3D rendering to lay out a framework for where these kinds of practices might start to exist and act and suggests tactics and techniques for a new radical culture of rendering.

Introduction

Speaking at London’s Architecture Association in 1971, Adolfo Natalini, founder of the radical architecture firm Superstudio presented an argument for Superstudio’s withdrawal from the work of architecture - producing buildings.

The self-appointed role of Superstudio as an architecture firm remains contentious since not a single one of their instantly recognisable designs was ever built. There are compelling arguments [Elfline, 2016] that the work that Superstudio pursued sat within the context of the leftist politics of the time and that they, like other critical practitioners both contemporary and historical, created obstructions to encourage disruption and engagement rather than buildings that continued the neoliberal hegemony they despised. Whether they created or obstructed, Superstudio recognised that the work of architecture is no more in construction than music is in getting to the end of a song. The work of architecture, design, art and all those fields with the privilege of creativity and critique is in building future imaginaries - renders of the way the world might be, orientating visions of future material products that ‘enchant’ our future.

In this way, architecture uses drawings, plans and increasingly, renders to materialise the future and present it to their audience. People relate to the built world first through its rendering before its construction. In 2015, when controversy surrounded the funding and construction of Thomas Heatherwick’s Garden Bridge in London, it had yet to exist. The future imaginary used was one of two or three renders of the bridge. It became the object around which public debate formed [Di Salvo, 2009] despite being, culturally at least, entirely imaginary.

Human material culture is riddled with future imaginaries. Cinema perhaps leads this field and several studies have pointed out how the penetration and resolution of these imaginaries feeds back into reality [Bassett et al. 2013]. Stephen Spielberg’s 2001 film, Minority Report is a particularly pertinent example. The fictional and completely rendered gestural interface used by Tom Cruise has held sway over 15 years of interface development and technology headlines. As rendering becomes a faster and more affordable alternative to expensive sets and protracted film shoots, television and advertising are following suit. Almost all car adverts in print and moving image are rendered, in 2014, 75% of IKEA catalogue images were 3D renders [Parkin, 2014]. The benefits of this approach are obvious, rendering is cheap, affordable, quickly iterative and allows of circumventing external factors: For example, the troublesome laws of physics. In 3D-rendering, dramatic sunrises can be made to last forever over perfect and empty mountain roads.

The danger is that we are limiting our imagination by creating a homogenous rendered visual culture. Buildings on development hoardings begin to look identical, cars and sofas have the same haptics. The developing visual language of 3D rendering is becoming self-reinforcing in its aspirations. We run the risk of a visual Shazam effect for rendered images.[Thompson, 2014] The Shazam effect, named for the music recognition software, is a phenomena whereby record companies produce music based on the download habits of users thus creating a reinforcing cycle of all music sounding the same. Rendering software developers increasingly develop tools and processes of their software around the demands of some of their biggest clients - architects and advertisers - creating a self-reinforcing aesthetic loop. The 3D digital artist Matthew Plummer-Fernandez claimed once in an interview to be able to recognise the software used to render buildings based on the ‘off-the shelf’ algorithms and plugins [Plummer-Fernandez, 2014].

A very real example of the Shazam effect in play is the work of Crystal CG, a Beijing-based rendering company who offer ‘fast turnaround, high quality and inspiring presentations, including 3D renderings, animations, multimedia and virtual reality.’ The website is packed with identikit steel and glass structures brooding under dramatic sunsets with the requisite amount of shadow-people render ghosts and street greenery to make an appealing frontispiece to any development hoarding. Their partners and clients are almost every major developer, several Olympic development projects and a range of ultra-rich micro-nations. The chances are you’ve seen some of their work and if not one of Crystal CG’s renderings then one of their competitors’.

The visual language epitomised by Crystal CG is thoroughly embedded in visual culture, at least in richer parts of the world. These developments could be anywhere, they are after all produced by artists who have never visited the sites in question and probably know very little of the local culture. They simply materialise a set of plans into something visually appealing and striking. However, the sheer onslaught of this aesthetic is becoming the steering narrative for what the future should be. In a recent trip to Colombo, Sri Lanka, I had a conversation with a representative of a redevelopment group building a massive office and shopping complex in the heart of the city. When I pointed out that the building looked like it could be from anywhere and asked who had created the render he said that he didn’t know… ‘some Chinese company.’

Looking at the rendered city sets of sci-fi films like Elysium and Star Wars reveals an aesthetic continuum between the hyper-real development renderings that pervade the city and how we imagine the future city to be. The rise of white and gleaming tower i inevitable as is the kitsch homage to the 70s utopian visions of space life. As if to concretise this relationship between urbanists, rendering artists and games developers, a 2014 project between city-developers and game-developers created rendered imaginaries of how Britain might look in the 22nd century showing cities like Manchester as hyper-real assemblages of placeless architecture and fantasy technology [Clarkson, 2014].

The future is imagined through these visual artefacts, and as they become more and more identical we run the significant risk of reducing our range of imagination. We might end up building an aesthetic cage in which we find it impossible to imagine a future beyond the gleaming towers and rendered greenery, in which the 45-degree skyline view becomes all encompassing and we dream of endless sunsets over our glass balconies.

In the late 1960’s Superstudio cannily seized on the cultural penetration that visual culture allows to seed alternative future imaginaries to what they saw as a visual hegemony. Their projects were visually rich and dizzying, playing into the language of cinema, collage and colour photography to inject a counter-narrative into popular culture. They realised, through exhibition and publication the reach of their work and how to play with these tools to introduce new ideas and critique. With the prevalence of rendering tools in contemporary culture, we can start to draw parallels with other contemporary practices and see how artists are using the tools of luxury flat renderings to build alternatives or critique the aesthetic hegemony we have.

The English word ‘render’ finds its etymology in the Latin ‘reddere’ - to ‘give back’ from which we also get the English word ‘redeem.’ So, in the spirit of redeeming myself I want to suggest an exceptionally loose categorisation of radical approaches to rendering largely from outside the architecture world: Un-Rendering, Low-Rendering and Hyper-Rendering. These categories are structured by the tactics that practices used to achieve the objective of engaging audiences in critical debate. In Un-Rendering we find practices trying to undo the render, to uncover the underlying technical reality of the rendering produced. Low-Rendering practices use intentionally low-resolutions, simplified, distorted and ambiguous imagery to encourage audiences to critically imagine the wider context of the work or the specifics of its functioning. And in Hyper-Rendering practitioners push the technical boundaries of rendering software and materials to create radical aesthetic imaginaries that critique the homogeneity of the rendered landscape. These practice create Overton-Window effects, introducing extreme and radical ideas in order to try and stretch the standard deviation of styles. I’ve also referred almost exclusively to practices outside what could be considered architecture. These practices are artists seizing the tools of architects to do other things, to think and act in non-architectural ways.

Un-Rendering 

Underlying any rendering we find a host of systemic conditions and requirements; the intermeshed complexities of planning, logistics, legal restrictions, engineering and infrastructure. The rendered image normally used for public consumption is the sharp end of this long and expensive sword. Practices of unrendering seek to investigate and reveal what is behind the rendering, to trace the thread of reality that the fantasy render is tied to.

Crystal Bennes’ archiving project #developmentaesthetics aims to ‘chronicle the rise and rise of the inane language and visuals used to market new buildings and developments in London (and increasingly across the UK).’ [Bennes, 2013] By presenting photographed images on a blog with almost no commentary, she flattens them and removes them from the context of glamour and aspiration in which they are supposed to be contextualised. By presenting them together she encourages us to draw comparisons between the aesthetics and language of contemporary architecture and development and critique the hegemony of the renders and hyperbole that surrounds them. Dan Hill’s similarly archival ongoing project Noticing Planning Notices serves to draw attention to the role of planning notices in civic engagement with development. He makes the point that ‘…the primary interface between the UK’s planning system and the people and places it serves is a piece of A4 paper tied to a lamppost in the rain.’ Rather than renderings serving as the main means of public engagement with the future of their cities, he extols a better understanding of planning processes as the ‘dark matter’ of future city development.

More radically, the artist Hito Steyerl, in her 2013 video work, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File highlights some of the technical limitations of rendering software. She tells us that ‘to become invisible, one has to become smaller or equal to one pixel.’ By playing to the aesthetic of pixel orientation markers, green-screening, rendering and satellite photography, she suggests ways that we might uses chromakeying and other technical processes to subvert the rendered and computer visible world and challenge renders on their own terms - unrendering ourselves. She also offers her own critique of rendered future imaginaries, citing the gated and exclusive communities of developers and describing how they enable invisibility and un-rendering for the ultra-rich at the other end of the spectrum.

Low-Rendering

Low-rendering intentionally challenges the spectacle of the hyper-real. Rather than presenting complete worlds of smiling residents, playing and working in a perfectly lit and maintained space, low-renders show only a framework or an idea and invite the audience to sketch out the details, often drawing their own conclusions as to the purpose and function of the plan.

In Dunne and Raby’s 2013 project, United MicroKingdoms, the UK has been split into four allegorical political and economic systems: Digtiarians, a society governed by algorithms with a mobile-phone tariff style economy; Communo-Nuclearists, a zero-sum communitarian economy based on the near limitless energy supplied by nuclear power; Bio-Liberals, a techno-utopia social democracy based on synthetic biological technology and Anarcho-Evolutionists, an anarchist society based on self-augmentation and experimentation. Rather than represent these speculative societies through complex RAND-style diagrams, masterplans and papers, the designers created vehicles used by the citizens; driverless robocars for the Digitarians, a nuclear-powered train disguised as landscape for the Communo-Nuclearists, slow biological machine cars for the Bio-Liberals and a communal bicycle for the Anarcho-Evolutionists.

The aesthetics of the vehicles presented are themselves low-resolution, with simplistic designs and pastel colours. They’re not meant to reflect the technical demands or limitations of the technologies but the wider contextual system of politics in which they’re embedded. Similar in detail and sheen to how the background of architecture renderings often appear, (non-descript grey or white blocks fading into the software’s clipping distance.) the models and images of United MicroKingdoms serve as tools for thought and boundary marking rather than outcomes in their own right.

In Superflux’s 2015 film Uninvited Guests, a similar tactic is used. Ostensibly a design fiction about a ‘smart’ future, the film’s technological devices - a walking stick, a fork and a bed - all variously connected to the Internet and sharing data are intentionally shown in low-resolution as generic fluorescent yellow objects with no detail to put them out of the ordinary as objects in themselves.

Matthew Plummer-Fernandez’s 2015 Peak Simulator builds a physical mountain range from the same algorithm used in early computer-generated landscapes. By then physicalising and placing this landscape in a real landscape, he highlights the dissonance between the computer-generated world at low resolution and the real. The leap in complexity between what could be said to be the ‘infinite resolution’ of the ‘real world’ and how the landscape can be made to appear on screen dismantles the spectacle of the rendering and shows it for the fabrication it really is as well as demonstrating how this type of generic landscape is technically generated.

Low-rendering practices use intentionally ‘under-developed’ material and visual qualities to draw the audience away from the specifics of the materials, objects and technologies they are talking about and to think critically about the processes and contexts that have created and supported them. In the case of Superflux and Dunne and Raby this is to draw the viewer away from the specifics of the technology and into wider contextual discussions. In the case of Plummer-Fernandez, this is to draw the audience away form the spectacle of procedurally-processed computer generated landscapes and into the reality of their technical construction and their un-real nature.

Hyper-Rendering

Hyper-rendering builds on and exploits the techniques and technologies of renderings to push aesthetic boundaries towards new future imaginaries and to critique power. These practices intentionally subvert the real world and push the hyper-real nature of commercial rendering to new extremes to draw out their absurdity or to develop new ways of critiquing.

Lawrence Lek’s 2015 Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy is Yours) uses the Unity game engine to imagine a future Royal Academy in London that has been bought by a Chinese oligarch. The hyper-real fantasy of Lek’s Royal Academy defies all aesthetic sensibilities, great works of modern art are gathered and flung haphazardly around the garishly painted space. The space has been militarised and a private helicopter sits on the roof. Lek suggests that this is the way the ultra-rich see the world, as a decontextualised game space to be reconfigured at will. Sascha Pohflepp and Chris Woebken’s 2016 The House in The Sky uses similar rendering techniques to critique society’s upper echelons. Based off photographs, they recreated the mid-20th century home of top RAND strategists and re-staged the discussion rumoured to have happened there. In playing with ideas of modelling and representations through rendering they critique the top-down ideology of RAND strategists during the founding period of neoliberal strategising.

Both of these practices use rendering as an embedded part of their critique. Using the hyper-real properties of rendering software to interpret the unimaginable and impenetrable worlds of the elite and represent them in a performative way that somehow embodies their approaches - form the abstracted world-renderings of RAND strategists to the game-like fantasies of the ultra-rich.

Playing more with the simulative potential of rendering software, Berlin studio Zeitguised produce stunning hyper-real animations that defy physical laws and exist in another realm previously unimagined. Zeitguised position themselves somewhere between arts and fashion though their work exists entirely in digital form. Most of their clients are advertisers who look to them for a rendered aesthetic that’s a little more edgy than their competitors but in their work is a glimpse of the possibility of rendering software - to completely refigure physical laws and create total fantasies that exceed the bounds of a perfected future-present. Another project of Pohflepp and Woebken’s, Island Physics is a curated digital installation of artists working with the open-source rendering software Blender. The artists play with the potential of augmented reality and Blender’s physics simulations to create impossible visual spectacles that fill the exhibition space. As much a technical demonstration of the ability of open source software, it’s also a precursor to its potential to do radically different forms of rendering to those scene on development hoardings around the world.

Another pertinent yet unrealised potential for radical rendering is in virtual reality. Here the opportunity for immersive counter-future-imaginaries is huge but largely undeveloped. A notable exception is A Short History of the Gaze by Molleindustria, a virtual reality game where users occupy the gaze in notable cultural moments form the panopticon to a French boulevard. The project is a clever double-header playing with the idea of looking and seeing and being seen with the new reality-blindness of virtual reality.

Hyper-Rendering practices use the rendering software itself as the basis for critique and imagination. Rather than a tool to be circumvented as in un-rendering or used for critical discussion as in low-rendering, it in itself is vital to the projects and practices of hyper-rendering. As rendering software and it’s attendant technologies like virtual reality cheapens and accessibility and literacy grows we might expect to see a growth in practices using hyper-real rendering methods to create new imaginaries and develop political critiques. It is in hyper-rendering where we might find a contemporary equivalent to the approach of Superstudio, seizing the tools normally used to reinforce the aesthetic hegemony over future imaginaries and turning it to new purposes.

Conclusion

Rendering software is at the root of much of the visual culture that surrounds us everyday and its penetration is increasing, from cinema and architecture to advertising and sales imagery. As a tool it is largely used to prop up an existing aesthetic hegemony that makes imagining alternative futures hard. We run the risk of a Shazam effect, where the aesthetic of rendered futures self-replicates and we are unable to imagine alternatives.

What these practices, and the hundreds like them present is another way that the tools of rendering might be used to create alternative future imaginaries or to challenge the existing ones, to broaden our aesthetic range and thus our range of future imaginaries.

Bassett C., Steinmueller E., Voss G., (2013) Better Made Up: The Mutual Influence of Science fiction and Innovation, Nesta working paper
Bennes, C., (2013) #DevelopmentAesthetics, tumblr http://developmentaesthetics.tumblr.com
Clarkson, N., (2014) How Might Space Travel Change Our Cities, Virgin. https://www.virgin.com/disruptors/how-might-space-travel-change-our-cities
Di Salvo, C., (2009) Design and th Construction of Publics, Design Issues: Volume 25, Number 1 Winter 2009, MIT Press
Hill, D., (2015) Noticing Planning Notices, author’s blog, http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2015/04/planning-notices.html
Parkin, K., (2014) Building 3D with Ikea, CGSociety, http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/building_3d_with_ikea
Plummer Fernandez, M. ,(2014) ‘You can spot what software has been used to design a building’, Dezeen, https://www.dezeen.com/2014/10/17/movie-matthew-plummer-fernandez-you-can-spot-software-design-building/
Ross K. E., (2016) Superstudio and the “Refusal to Work”, Design and Culture, 8:1, 55-77
Srnicek, N., Williams, A., (2015) Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work, New York: Verso Books
Thompson, D., (2014) The Shazam Effect, The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-shazam-effect/382237/

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7.3.16 LIFT: The Internet of Damned Things, by Open Transcripts

Normally this would be the time where I'd reluctantly sit down and bash out a talk I gave a few weeks previously while trying to recapture the essence of what I said as I stumbled through what, at one point, were well rehearsed points on a stage. For some reason, transcribed or written up talks travel better than videos. I suppose Medium is to blame. Anyway, Open Transcripts, who did excellent coverage of Haunted Machines last year, have done it for me.

It's a great project which you should absolutely support on Patreon.

Anyway, here's the link. There's also a transcript of Joel's and Nat's talks from the same session. The great thing is that all the sources of quotes and so on have been linked up. Go check it out.

8.11.15 This Did Not Take Place, IMPAKT Fesitival 2015

What follows is a writeup of the talk I gave at IMPAKT Fesitval this year in Utrecht on the subject of memory and technology. I have to confess that there was a lot more profanity as I delivered the talk due generally to being ill for months. 

I'm trained as a designer but I don't really design anything. I find it a useful thing to say rather than do. I spend most of my time thinking about, writing about and talking about relationship between technology, politics and design. So when the guys from IMPAKT asked me if I had any opinions about the relationship between memory and technology I was like; 'Hell yeah I have opinions about everything.' And so here are those opinions.

The title of this talk takes its name from the very famous book by Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. In the book, Baudrillard argues that the 1991 Gulf War did not take place. Obviously. Not that there was ipso facto no Gulf War, he's not like a Gulf War denialist, but that the Gulf War as it was presented through 24 hour rolling media was not the Gulf War that was lived on the ground. The Gulf War was a highly orchestrated media 'atrocity' masquerading as a war and Baudrillard talks about how manipulation of the media changed the narrative that was received in Europe and the US.

So the first part of this talk is about how the manipulation of media changes the remembered narrative of those who receive it. This is a kind of prosaic idea, hardly new. We're used to states and corporations controlling cultural narratives through the media but I think we live at a point where, interestingly, individuals have a high-degree of control over their own personal narrative and through the connected nature of things begin to change the wider socio-political narratives we have, perhaps unknowingly.

In the background is a video from a cruise missile nosecam. The Gulf War was also the first war where we had images of the conflict directly from the weapons themselves. The nosecam of a cruise missile shows great power, control and high-technology but at the same time is a mechanical contradiction: The camera is destroyed at the point where the weapon fulfils its purpose. And so we have all the foreplay of war with the showy aspects of control and power without any of the terror, chaos and suffering that the cruise missile brings. The cruise missiles becomes a form of media.

And so the second part of this talk, the second aspect at play, is sight. We're visual animals, most of our memories are visual (even though it's not as strong as olfactory memory) and we tend to trust what we see. So the proliferation of small, mobile cameras leads to new conceptions of how memories are recorded and what they mean.

And so we begin with cinematic tour-de-force that is Google's How It Feels (through Google Glass). Two minutes and fifteen seconds of film history. Glass, for those that don't know, was Google's ill-fated attempt to create a consumer augmented reality market. Google Glass was a headset that you would wear on your head. It only did four things that no-one ever wanted badly and so didn't get very far. The key thing is that it was a head mounted camera from which you record and stream stuff. And that's how Google try and sell this thing - through the experiences it enables.

You only see the product itself appear for six seconds in the entire clip but you get to do a wealth of weird stuff - flying balloons and planes, sculpting tigers from ice, playing with a dog on a deserted beach and so on. Essentially now that you have hands free you can better experience things and experience is inseparable from the recording of those things.  Google are telling you that their technology enables experiences, not how it works, what it does, or what it's for.

Experience has become a really central part of our technological narrative, born largely from the protestant work ethic and there's two distinct flavours of experience. The first is the kind of sexy, rarefied Instagram experience - swimming with dolphins, flying planes, eating cakes. And you have to photograph and upload them or it might as well have not happened. They're usually accompanied by some reminder of your own mortality too - 99 Things To Do Before You Die - as if not swimming with dolphins is just a waste of good oxygen. 

The second meaning of experience is 'expertise' and the two things are completely interconnected. At job interviews you're asked about your experience. Experience adds to your expertise and makes you more socially valuable and you evidence this experience by photographing it and uploading it. 

Here's the advertisement for the Apple iPhone 5. There's very little information about what it actually is, its battery life or processing power, size or weight. Just lots of information about what it can do. And that is take photos, as if this is some brand-new never before conceived of technology. Apple tells you how the technology will enable you to gather and share more experiences than ever before, more photos of cakes and lakes than your mates. 

This sales pitch of technology as an experience-enabler is hardly new. We've had 'sex sells' for a damn sight longer than we've had GPS or the Internet. Here's the compulsory vintage futurism of a any talk like this. What I believe is the oldest cell phones advert, from Radio Shack in 1989. And already we can see that the technology is sold on its experience generating potential. You can now phone people from the beach! Work hard and have fun!

But there's a crucial difference between the cell phones of old and the cell phones of now. These vintage cell phones augment your experience. They allow you to multi-task and become more mobile (or, perhaps force you to multi-task and become more mobile.) But they don't record your experiences.

The average smart phone has 19 sensors in it: Light, proximity, two cameras, three microphones (one of which is ultrasound,) touch. Positioning comes via GPS, Wi-FI, Cellular, Near Field and Bluetooth technologies. And it contains an accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, pressure sensor and temperature and humidity sensor.

In fact these devices aren't just recording your experiences, they're capturing high-resolution, detailed versions of parts of your life and remembering them.

Things remember you. This is the Simplicam, which can act as a stand-in for anyone of the 99% of Internet of Things projects that are about surveillance and mass data capture. The Internet of Things i rapidly becoming the world's largest surveillance infrastructure and one that we're weirdly excited to invite into our homes.

The aim of this infrastructure is to constantly record, monitor and store data on you and your behaviour.

This is the Amazon Echo. It kind of staggers me that when Amazon said they wanted to put an always-on microphone into people's homes everyone just thought that was OK. A corporation manufactures, sells and distributes spyware and everyone just lapped it up. The purpose of the Amazon Echo is to act as a hub for Internet of Things products but also find ways to make it easier for you to buy stuff from Amazon. At it's core are data-gathering; listening to things you say in the house in order to better target products at you and also acting as a personal shopper; directly responding to your impulsive needs for soap or blue pants.

Worse still is something like the Samsung Smart TV. Samsung are kind of explicit that the purpose of the microphone is to allow you to control the TV by voice but yet again, the microphone is always on, always gathering data and always sending it off to third-parties to be analysed. Samsung had to later send out a disclaimer:

You can control your SmartTV, and use many of its features, with voice commands. If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you. In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.

So yeah, this is Samsung telling you not to volcalise any sensitive or intimate information. In your living room. 

These systems gather huge amounts of data about you but only the data that's relevant to them. They're not interested in why you like blue panties, only that you do and then they use that to sell you blue panties in the most effective way possible. They build what's called a 'data double' - a slightly inaccurate chalk outline of who you are, made only of data points of relevance to that company or corporation and inevitably flawed by the technology. This is why it gets weird when these data doubles try to reach out to us. We and they imagine that they gathering of enough data is enough to make them empathetic can human-ish.

Here's Facebook doing it's whole memory-lane thing that it's trying to do at the moment. I'm really bad at Facebook, I mostly use it for self-promotion, so it's constantly prodding me to interact. Three years, it tells me I've been friends with Paul Revell. My dad.

It's accurate, but completely out of context. And just getting this in the middle of the day out of nowhere kind of throws you for a bit of a loop.

And it could have been worse. This is Eric Meyer's Facebook page a year ago. Facebook decided to send him a prompt to share his year with others and showed him an image of his daughter. Who had died a few weeks earlier from a terminal illness. Now, Eric Meyer was the first to admit that Facebook aren't dicks. They don't always wantonly go about trying to emotionally bully people. It's just that we assume these systems are so advanced and so sophisticated that they have some built-in human sensitivity, they don't. Facebook is a database, not a friend. It's got great data on pain but it can never understand the embodied experience of feeling pain. It can't empathise, it can just react to data available. It's not good at being your friend but the narrative we build and it builds suggests that it is.

Which brings us on to the idea of gaslighting. Gaslighting is a term for psychological and emotional manipulation, bullying and violence particularly through the control of environmental conditions. The term comes from the film of the same name and is essentially indicative of a process where someone convinces someone else that they are imagining things happening or tells them things are happening which can't be observed.

The proliferation of fallible, manipulable connected devices and our emotional reliance on them leaves the territory for gaslighting wide open and leaves us with sticky problems as far as questioning our own reality goes.

This brings us rather neatly back to our idea of a non-existent Gulf War. Here's Dick Cheney addressing the press at Desert Shield with an angry looking Colin Powell in the background. This was the 'media circus' of the Gulf War. The main reason that the version of the Gulf War broadcast was so tightly controlled was because the press were so tightly regimented. The US dubbed this regimentation Annex Foxtrot and they forbade the press from going into the field, talking with normal soldiers or civilians or leaving strict enclosures. This was the mechanic by which the Gulf War story was told to Europe and the US.

We have the same thing today but perhaps more inadvertently in our coverage of warfare. If you google the word 'drone' this image crops up in the top ten hits. Five years ago it and various versions would have filled the top ten. For years this was the de facto image of a drone used in coverage of what we were learning about drone warfare. It littered blogs, newspapers and social media. Last year though it was revealed to be a rendering created by a hobbyist.

Now it doesn't matter hugely. There was no one pointing at this specific drone and saying it specifically did something - it was used as a generic placeholder image. However it's skews the visual narrative of how we think about and visualise drone warfare when collective memory thinks of a render when thinking about drone warfare.

More prosaically, I discovered last year that 26% of Ikea images are renders. Probably more now. It makes sense to produce renders rather than pay to set up and photograph these sets. However there's some strange dissonance about publishing aspirational imagery of a thing that we think is real and isn't. This living room never existed, the people and lifestyle implied by it never did. That's no different to advertising or any other kind of vision, but it exists in a visual language of reality as opposed to futurity and introduces an interesting element of impossibility.

 Stalin was well know for his manipulation of imagery. He erased enemies and the disappeared from the collective memory of Soviet Russia as a way to cement his power and control the narrative of history. Now, and then in the west, we look back on this and see it as crude, dictatorial. We think that citizens must have been cynical and sceptical about these images. But in reality, at the time, like most contemporary media, it slipped seamlessly into the collective memory - just another part of the story. Soviet citizens may have known the images were doctored but they didn't view them critically like we do now.

It's interesting to think if in fifty years visual anthropologists will look back at the realistic renders populating our visual culture and wonder how we so un-cynically accepted the creep of irreality into our collective memory. And who know what effect it might have in years to come?

This is a very famous image and one of much contention. It appears to show a scene in Berlin taken by a Google Street View car where a Smart car has pulled over and a woman (presumably formerly in the car) is giving birth on the side of the road. In 2010 this was in the press a lot with the obvious question - is it real?

But that's not quite the question. There's more nuance to it. You see we instantly recognise and see-through the fact that it's a street view image. The visual cues are all there - the map in the corner, watermarking and the camera style. But we could also ask, not just if it's a real birth, but if it's a real street view photo. How hard would this to be knock up in photoshop? We're so familiar with this media of global representation that we don't really critically question the context of the photo. We're a bit like Soviet citizens being fed doctored photographs, we see through the context and question what's inside rather than the whole setup itself. This might be a real birth and a fake Google Street View image.

In fact if we look back on the same scene today, even more questions are raised. The ad agency that the image was taken in front of denies having anything to do with it, and yet that appears to be the same smart car at the bottom of the image. The hospital on the other side of the road quite sensibly suggested that had a live birth taken place outside, they would have noticed. Even more interesting are the dates. The original image is watermarked 2010 and this one is copyrighted from 2008 with a 2012 watermark and a significant growth in the trees. Another aspect of this world-remembering machine is the ability to forensically examine the past.

 Of course, we can't talk about memory without reference to time. The image here is from Fritz Lang's Woman in The Moon. Lang said that the rocket launch scene wasn't tense enough so introduced the countdown clock as a way to build tension. NASA loved it and now a dependence on time is inexorably tied to the popular imagination of space flight.

In fact, the history of time itself is deeply tied to technology. This is the 1830 Liverpool and Manchester Railway. For most of human history, people operated on localised time. It wasn't until the construction of massive communications and transport infrastructures that a standardised sense of time was required. Before the railway, Manchester and Liverpool kept different times. This was the first timetabled railway line and the company had to enforce standardised time so that people could understand when trains departed and arrived. Within a few years, the standardised time used in timetabling had spread across the country and by 1880 the western world was on Greenwich Mean Time, all aligning clocks to London time. With standardised time, clocks and watches become the first networked devices.

We can look at the Global Positioning System as a continuation of this project. Sending satellites into space to more accurately pinpoint the position objects in time and space to better synchronise the working of the Earth as a planetary machine.

The Internet is a large physical infrastructure that relies on being very carefully synchronised and standardised to even work. The construction of this 'world brain' of GPS and the Internet that can very accurately and quickly understand and compute the relative position in time and space of everything connected to it means that we more and more and think of the mind as an architectural space as the ancients did.

For a long time, the modernists considered the body and mind to be liquid; ethers, biles and juices. Yet now we see the popular resurgence of 'memory palaces.' Once again we are starting to visualise the mind as a physical architectural space. After all, if the Internet behaves like a human brain and possesses architectural dimensions, it makes sense to assume that the brain is much the same.

And what does Google do with its memory palace? Well it allows you to stroll through it, and kind of add to it. This is the Memories For The Future project. In it, Google put the street view images of Fukushima before the tsunami out for people to stroll through and remember their old homes, places of work and so on. It also appeals to the morbidly curious I suppose. But that possessive title is a bit of a giveaway; implying Google's self-appointed role of guardian of the collective memory. These aren't your memories you're strolling through; their Google's. And as you stroll through them you feed them data about who you are, what you're looking at and what you do while you're there. They've constructed a dead town as a data playground. 

Sure, I'm being cynical. Google most likely genuinely thought this would be a good idea for those that had lost so much, and for those it probably is. But good intentions dont' betray the underlying ideology-as-business-model. Google makes money from you doing stuff. It wants you to do stuff and will make money from all the stuff you do, including looking at images of your destroyed home.

Which kinda leads us on into the last section - Manufacturing Memories. The still there is from the remake of the Manchurian Candidate. Which I consider superior to the original. In the film, Liev Schrieber undergoes brainwashing treatment during his time in the Gulf War to become a brain dead assassin - his memories and those memories of his comrades entirely fabricated in the lab.

So DeepDream is really interesting. By now we've all seen weird, kinda horrifying images created by it everywhere and enjoyed their novelty. There's something really human about us celebrating the aesthetic failures of technology. It's why Instagram is so popular. The best analogy I've heard for how DeepDream works is that it's like asking a child to draw a house. All children draw pretty much the same house because they've had limited exposure to images of houses from which to synthesise the idea of what a house is. Which is why child's houses look relatively generic - square, four windows, a door and a triangular roof.

DeepDream is kind of like that but it's only ever seen pictures of dogs.

So when you ask it to draw the aliens meme guy it just draws it in dogs. The purpose of this exercise is two-fold. Firstly, computers can't recognise discrete objects in images well. Humans are blessed by being able to visually comprehend, describe and represent a cup. A computer needs that data codified. DeepDream allows Google to recognise cups in pictures by comparing them to dogs (in a way.) Secondly, much like a child, that analysis allows DeepDream to create new images of cups. Which is where it gets interesting.

Deep Stereo is a spin off of DeepDream using similar neural network technology. Deep Stereo can interpolate between still images and create and understand 3D space and movement. Now, this may jsut seem like great technology which would make Street View a lot more fun. But think back to our house-drawing child. They might grow up to be an architect and really study houses to understand how they work and then synthesise that knowledge into new types of houses. Or, they might design film sets. Or, they might run a ponzi scheme in property. It's all based on the same basic understanding and analysis of the raw data of what a house is.

Think back to the drone and Ikea renders. Those things are innocuous. Deep Stereo implies a future in which Google can quite convincingly write and manufacture memories that never happened to an incredible degree of accuracy. 

Milan Kundera's quote is quite literal. Of course some people do rewrite history. But the companies harvesting data are doing it because of the inflated fiction of the value of data. We value our past and so we invest our data back into it. Buying surveillance cameras, more aggressively experiential smart phones and more and more accounts. We share stuff because we're vain and want to be remembered or noticed. This gives value to those who guard this endless stream of stuff and in turn makes them more valuable. A feedback loop exists between your future memories and the rapid expansion of technological power today. Google probably do just want to get better and better at capturing the world, but in their quest to do so, they're developing tools to rewrite future history.

I guess the pithy takeaway here is our relationship with the things that remember us. We're not remembered by people so much as things. Objects and devices constantly busy remembering us, some we asked to, some we didn't. And they send all these memories off to places that we may not know about or understand or want to have them. But like I said, we're vain like that and we don't have as much control as we'd like. Your Facebook account is not your own, it's everyone's and Facebook's. It is a database of advertising targets not a family photo album. Their both databases and they both uses similar design to convince us to share and record but they're purposes are vastly different.

And in this desperation to constantly harvest and grab memories, we're making the cameras and eyes that record our experiences ever smaller and more ubiquitous and easier to use. In doing so, we unintentionally invite other actors to control our perception of our experiences. A Go-Pro for instance, just happens to fit in a sea gull's beak.