Prefiguration and Performance
Prefigurative and performative projects invite the audience to ‘live’ the alternative social or economic model. During the emergence of Occupy Wall Street and its various offshoots through 2011, ‘prefigurative politics’ came to refer to the way Occupy activists blended protest and speculation as a form of social critique – something described by anthropologist David Graeber as ‘the idea that the organizational form that an activist group takes should prefigure the kind of society we wish to create’.7 Similar approaches have been used in experiential futurism as ways of inviting participants in a debate to ‘live’ the experience of the changes being discussed in order to reflect on such from an embodied perspective. In contrast with documentarian and archivist approaches, the barrier between the alternative world and the present is broken, rendered permeable to audiences.
In the group project Micronations Revolution (2011), coordinated by Nelly Ben Hayoun, a range of artists and designers were invited to contribute experiences that would form a series of staged micro-states for an audience. While apparently playful and seizing on the pataphysical idea of ‘imaginary solutions’, this project invited participants to question their assumptions about existing political systems through jousting contests, music performances, political speeches, staged revolutions and manifesto workshops. This intense and enclosed political theme park used role play, performance and entertainment as forms of lived political satire. Ben Hayoun’s project was an extreme, anarchist version of a Model UN, with the staged farce undercutting and critiquing the presumed standards and conventions of global governance.
In Hawaii 2050 (2006), futurists Jake Dunagan and Stuart Candy, with the support of the Hawaii State legislature, staged a series of immersive events as a means of engaging an audience of 600 people in considering a set of potential futures for Hawaii. Building from four generic images of the future – continue, collapse, discipline and transform – and mimicking the forms of a gubernatorial debate, a citizenship ceremony, an environmental education workshop and a business pitch for human enhancements, the scenarios became social objects: a stimulus for public dialogue and a set of anchors for attendees’ own images of the future. By engineering situations in which the audience played an important symbolic role, standing in for sections of society with a personal and emotional investment in the outcome of the scenes, the event attendees briefly became stakeholders in the futures portrayed.
Austin Houldsworth’s Walden Note-Money (2014) presents the design of a machine for behavioural change. Houldsworth engages in what he calls counter-fictional design: pursuing fictional designs to their logical conclusions. In this case, a machine is constructed to destroy money. In a given economic exchange, the ‘seller is obliged to aid the buyer in the destruction of their money equal to the cost of the service or object he/she is purchasing. Through the destruction of money, musical notes are created which are linked to the coins’ denomination.’ The project bears the hallmarks of other mechanised systems of economic representation, such as Bill Phillips’ 1949 Monetary National Income Analogue Computer, which used the flow of water to represent the flow through a complex machine design to represent the movement of money in the UK economy. Although Phillips’ machine served as a representative model, while Houldsworth proposes a device to facilitate exchange, like a till or credit card machine, both demonstrate how economics and machines are interlinked, their uses scripted with the assumed behaviours of their respective societies. In Houldsworth’s machine, based on B. F. Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two, the machines act to adjust people’s behaviour by rewarding them with music instead of maintaining a ‘store of value’.
Shing Tat Chung’s Superstitious Fund (2012) was a live fund of just over £5,000, supported by crowdsourced investment, which derived a model of investment decision-making from numerology and the changing phases of the Moon. A satire of control and human agency in high finance, it was also a tense experiment, with real consequences for the people who had invested their real money. The significance of this project is determined less by whether the experiment fails or succeeds (which, in keeping with the rest of the project, was largely down to chance) than the mere fact of its existence. The project is materialised in a giant billboard hanging over an exhibition space with a number showing the current total and changes in the fund’s value. Designed to evoke sports results boards and the displays and interfaces of betting shops, it trivialises high finance and makes it darkly humorous.
Prefiguration and performative projects examine the material experience of alternative economic models. Owing a great deal to role play, theatre and experiential futurism, they invite an audience to occupy the model and to embody its routines. They collapse the wall between the speculative and the present and allow us a glimpse of the experience of being in the world, making the resultant dissonance all the more urgent and tense. Alternatively, as in the case of Ben Hayoun’s project, they might extract the audience from the current world, placing them in a space in which they can experiment safely with alternatives and release themselves from the constraints of existing systems.
Speculative Proposition
In mid-2014 the neoliberal ‘paradise’ of Galt’s Gulch, Chile, became mired in accusations of fraud and deception. Named after the central character in Ayn Rand’s objectivist novel Atlas Shrugged, the construction of the no-man’s land-cum-libertarian community – supported by a reported $10,000,000 from 73 private investors – fell through. In doing so, it joined a long line of false-start economic experiments. The internet is rife with renders of secluded islands and seasteading projects that never get off the ground, due to lack of support or the cold reality of the projects’ sheer scale. But the proposals for these projects still exist as artefacts of the desire for alternative ways of life. Similar to masterplans but operating more as ideological statements than architectural layouts, these propositions tend to inflate an outsider perspective on capitalism, appealing to those who wish to escape or live outside ‘the system’. With the success of a handful of communitarian projects, from Christiana in Denmark to Auroville to Sealand and the temporary autonomous zone of Burning Man, these proposals continue to seize the popular imagination and provide fertile ground for speculative models of society and the economy.
Hermicity (2016) exists at the reductio ad absurdum of today’s technologically driven neoliberal dream. Invoking and echoing the language of blockchain, drones and Silicon Valley tropes regarding the colonisation of Mars, this proposal promises total self-sufficiency (or, more accurately, loneliness) while playing tongue in cheek with the ideas of various spokespeople of anti-statist luminaries, from Rand to Henry David Thoreau. At its core is a ‘rainbow’ paper – a proposal from Dr Yung Pure, apparently sent back from the future – in which an excessively intricate detailing of the project’s baroque financing and infrastructural arrangements is couched in internet humour and kitsch 16-bit aesthetics.
Another project by Austin Houldsworth, Crime Pays (2012), proposes an entirely transparent transaction system, allowing any member of the public to see the transactions of any other. For a small fee, however, a purchaser can anonymise their transaction. The project thus raises questions about how criminal interactions are carried out. Rather than being exhibited as an obvious fiction, Houldsworth uses an actor to present the proposal at an information technology conference, embedding it in the real world in order to gauge the response of professionals working on similar systems. This technique of guerrilla proposals, similar to the approach of activist group the Yes Men, has an amazing power to give realism to the proposal, even as it raises complex ethical questions about how acceptable it is to hoax or mislead an audience. By means of a disclaimer, the text currently under the video on Houldsworth’s website reads: ‘Please note: this is a speculative design and concept.’
Similar in technique to the documentarian and archivist approach but breaching the wall between the real and non-real, these projects rely on technica
l details to draw us in, playing with the tropes and techniques of real pitches and proposals such that the information and implications can be absorbed and, even if not fully understood, imagined. They often employ a sense of reductio ad absurdum – pushing slightly further than is currently imaginable, but using technical ephemera and corporate tropes to evoke a sense of plausibility.
Conclusion
The projects reviewed here challenge the notion that speculative design is occupied solely with ‘informed extrapolations’ of emerging technologies,8 highlighting how technological systems and innovation practices are themselves underwritten by economic models and alternative value systems. This is made most explicit in projects such as United Micro Kingdoms and Sascha Pohflepp’s The Golden Institute (2009), which depicts scenarios from an alternative US history in which – following the election of President Carter for a second term – the state pushes for investment and innovation in renewable energies. As in the many projects detailed above, the work depicts the processes and practices by which economic values are inscribed in socio-technical systems.
The projects we describe here reach beyond the written form, embodying the material, linguistic, sensorial and performative qualities of economic systems, offering audiences a handhold on the knowable and familiar – legalese, graphs, contracts, conversations – before pushing them out to the uncomfortable edges. In the round, they demonstrate the plurality of ways we have to recognise, read and respond to value systems through sense-making, embodiment, affect and analysis; how the mundane and spectacular artefacts of economic models are presented to us, and how we inhabit them.
Through their complexity and intentional ambiguity, speculative and critical designs of economic models tease out both the cracks and the gloss in imagined utopias. At a point when money is increasingly dephysicalised, and the automation of value production uncoupled from the physical interaction of things,9 speculative and critical design projects offer a means to engage with the embodied and ephemeral spillovers of economic systems, experiencing their textures and physicality first-hand.
1P. G. Raven (2016) Ways of Telling Tomorrows: (Science) Fictions, Social Practices and the Future(s) of Infrastructure, paper presented at DEMAND conference ‘What Energy Is For: The Making and Dynamics of Demand’, Lancaster, UK, 13 April.
2T. More (1516 [1966]) Utopia. London: Scolar Press.
3A. Dunne & F. Raby (undated) Critical Design FAQ, Dunne & Raby, www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/13/0.
4J. Auger (2013) Speculative Design: Crafting the Speculation, Digital Creativity, 24(1): 11–35.
5Auger, Speculative Design.
6Raven, Ways of Telling Tomorrows.
7D. Graeber (2013) The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement. New York: Spiegel & Grau, p. 23.
8Auger, Speculative Design.
9F. Berardi (2012) Emancipation of the Sign: Poetry and Finance during the Twentieth Century, e-flux journal, 39, http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_8960488.pdf.
IV
Fumbling for Utopia
Unrealised hopes lie all around us. They don’t exist only in the failed plans of the past, nor do they necessarily reside in plans at all, but can be glimpsed in unexpected places, as a glimmer of a different future, or at least as an absence in the present. At the intersection of economic science and economic fiction are the moments when a dominant economic ‘reality’ meets its other, or could do. How to grasp these moments? How to narrate them, and give them a reality, in spite of their alienation from orthodox accounts of economics?
The fictions and reimaginings contained in this section touch on those moments where routinised economic normality is potentially diverted towards something different and more hopeful. Environmental economist Tim Jackson takes the experience of sailing on the Norfolk Broads to offer a meditation on the challenge of transition, in the face of economic threats to our natural conditions of life. The ‘liminal’ space between different spheres of life (and of economy) is represented as a disorientating one, disturbing yet profoundly hopeful, with all the risks that go with that. Anthropologist Judy Thorne discovers a utopian longing amongst youthful interviewees struggling with day-to-day social and economic realities in a further education college. These aren’t merely complaints, but expressions of a different, more desirable world.
Miriam A. Cherry, a legal scholar, presents a glimpse of an alternative economic and industrial history and future, in which the Luddites were successful in their battle against alienating technology. This is outlined via an entry in a fictional encyclopedia, detailing how the Luddite vision won. ‘Sustainomics’ is the result, in which technology serves human and natural life, rather than vice versa. And, finally, we have a science fiction about the money supply written by Jo Lindsay Walton. In the scenario constructed by Walton, the government is seeking to aggressively nationalise the money supply for its own militaristic and security purposes. An alternative model, based around the democratisation of monetary control, struggles nobly against this, and things don’t necessarily work out for the worst.
14
Shooting the Bridge: Liminality and the End of Capitalism
Tim Jackson
I wake early on the day of the passage. Nylon halyards are beating an impatient samba on the aluminium mast. The wind has risen discernibly overnight and a tiny knot of anxiety clenches and unclenches in the pit of my stomach. Turning Tropical Wind’s errant stern to leave our narrow berth will be the first of several challenges for myself and my novice crew. By the time we reach the bridge at Potter Heigham, we can count on a stiff force 5 or 6 to make the day more interesting.
We slip the moorings and make a slightly less than graceful exit against the unpredictable westerly now whipping across the crowded dyke. Clear of the entrance, I put in an early call to the bridge pilot, to check the state of the tide and the conditions on the river. ‘Right now we have about 6 foot 5 inches under the bridge,’ the pilot tells me. ‘And it’s pretty quiet here.’ The restless knot in my belly subsides a notch.
The oldest bridge on the Norfolk Broads (and the most difficult to navigate) dates back to 1385. The child king Richard, still just 17, was struggling to control the power of the Lords Appellant and Geoffrey Chaucer was busy conjuring up The Canterbury Tales when its stones were first set in place. Today the bridge is a screaming anachronism. No longer able to bear the volume of traffic crossing the river Thurne between Cromer and Great Yarmouth, its primary role has been usurped by a newer and far more practical carriageway a matter of 100 metres or so to the north-east.
The three stone arches of the original crossing offer instead a picture-postcard attraction for tourists and a source of amusement for canny locals. The bridge is a formidable challenge to those hoping to reach the tranquillity of the northernmost Broads: the relative solitude of Martham and Hickling Broads; the other-worldly beauty of Horsey Mere. Perhaps paradise should always come at such a price.
Only one of the arches is navigable. And then only at certain states of the tide. At best, a 7-foot span separates water from stone at the centre of the arch. At worst, it’s closer to 5 feet. Threading a high-masted sailing yacht through a 2-metre stone arch relies on a clever combination of technology, skill and faith. With a squally west wind and a spring tide, it’s wise to add a dollop of sheer bravado. Or else to moor up quietly and wait for more clement conditions.
Tropical Wind is equipped with a hinged mast and a cleverly ratcheted winch. A complex array of shackles and chains holds the mast up when needed and guides it down when unneeded. I’ve had the procedure explained to me. But I’ve never actually seen it done, and the exact sequence of actions is still a little hazy. If we do it correctly, we’ll be able to lower the mast safely until it rests horizontally along the coach roof and across a wooden crutch at the stern of the yacht. The yacht herself will be transformed from an elegant sailing vessel into a gaggle of flailing stays and halyards atop an unwieldy hull. But we’ll have reduced our height above t
he waterline to something under 2 metres. Sufficient in principle to slip unscathed beneath the medieval bridge. If we get it wrong, we’ll be the entertainment.
In the days before the new bridge was built, a skilled crew would sometimes approach the stone arch of the old bridge under full sail, lower mast and sail in one fell swoop and rely on tide and momentum to carry the boat through to the northern reaches of the Broads before rehoisting everything ready to continue. It was a mark of skill and a badge of honour to demast and remast the yacht without the use of an engine or a paddle and with barely a stutter in the forward speed of the hull. ‘Shooting the bridge’, they called it.
Our own ambitions are more conservative. We’ll sail north-west along the river under a carefully reefed mainsail until we reach the outskirts of Potter Heigham. There we’ll drop the sail and find a place safe enough to moor up and lower the mast. The passage through the two bridges will be accomplished very sedately, under power.
Economic Science Fictions Page 25