I’ve just had a chance to read and juxtapose two recently done articles: Remnants of the Biosphere (from BLDGBLOG) and Whatever Happened to Second Life? (from PC Pro).

The photo above (by Noah Sheldon – all of which are worth seeing) comes from the BLDGBLOG article – which might just be better to read than what I was going to say about it anyway. Suffice it to say, $200 million into a project to create a protected environment for life, things more or less went to pot.

I don’t have the estimate for how many millions have gone into the massive online environment Second Life, but it seems that it too is headed toward attrition of a certain kind. In the PC Pro article, Barry Collins argues that the promises of Second Life – among which that its ultimate-sandbox openness to invention would produce new and better ways of expressing humanity – have reduced somewhat since its creation. What Collins observes is that, given complete freedom to explore and create new ways of life, artistry and commerce, Second Life users have narrowed their energies onto real estate speculation, endless multiplication of needless possessions, and prostitution (of sorts that would be illegal in most places in “real life”) – the combination of which is now bringing in more money for the game than ever before.

Reading these articles together (which I hope you can find time to do), I was struck by the imagery of massive, technologically advanced structures built for the purpose of nurturing and guarding nascent and precious forms of life. A spirit of American enterprise and entrepreneurship fills both types of endeavors to the brim with optimism, pride and hope. Yet – anticlimactically – these projects have become (or are in the visible process of becoming) testaments to a spirit of waste, incoherence, self-focus, and social fragmentation. Cast as a place with no upper limits, Second Life seems to have come to be a place with no lower limits.

This is not as it somehow “must” be when it comes to grand projects – and this is not at all to say that there aren’t real, human interactions that can and do take place in virtual worlds and social networking: if either were true, this blog would neither be written nor read. But I still have to ask, what would it be like to see a massive means for artistic expression used well by a community of people – for each other’s sake?

I just read a very thought-provoking article by author Michael Chabon (pdf form here) on the idea of the future. Chabon was (2 years ago, in this case) writing about the Clock of the Long Now – a project of the Long Now Foundation: a group hoping to promote better long-term thinking in many areas. What Chabon writes is very interesting to me, for all sorts of reasons. I suppose it helps that I already enjoy his books, but his insights on this issue are very good, as well as being connected to some of our earlier posting about “alternative futures”. One thing that I automatically agreed with is that our imaginations lead us into our pursuits and inventions. Chabon makes the intriguing point, though, that “the future” – as it has come to be pursued – is really rather archaic (if you can call the 1950s that).

There is an oddness in realizing that, having done everything the “future” of the past wanted to accomplish (minus infinite food supplies and personal rocket packs), we are yet confronted by the same difficulties – and yet more deeply, perhaps we have lived out our past’s version of the future and now don’t know what to do next. There is no more future of the past to live out. So as we see the power of the imaginations of those from envisioned the future before, it should inspire us to re-envision for ourselves that future.

But part of the problem now is that “the future” previously envisioned hasn’t amounted to the utopia imagined – it’s just gotten filled with all of the gadgets and systematization we “always wanted”. The Clock that the Long Now Foundation is making reminds Chabon (and many others who think about this project) to take time to imagine life 100, 1,000, or 10,000 years from now. The incredible thing is, this can sometimes produce only a blank slate – forcing us to realize just how little vision we actually have, and how much “the future” of 60-year-old sci-fi is really a function of the past and present, rather than something we’re actively and creatively thinking about.

I’ve started to pay more attention to things Kevin Kelly is writing, especially on the “non-neutrality” of technology. His Technium is going to be a very important piece as we consider the issue of alternative futures and the imaginative visions driving those possible directions (in fact, the Technium project seems to be Kelly’s direct response to Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near). The post that I’ve just been reading today is “Triumph of the Default” (June 22, 2009). Kelly is commenting on the hidden influence on users’ experience of technology as it comes from its makers loaded with biases and presumed ideals. I quote the posting at length here:

Systems are not neutral. They have natural biases.  We tame the cascading choices we gain from accelerating technology by introducing small nudges — by deliberating embedding our own biases (also called a default) into the system here and there. We wield biases within inevitable technologies to aim them towards our common goals — increasing diversity, complexity, specialization, sentience, and beauty.

Defaults also remind us of another truth. By definition a default works when we — the user or consumer or citizen — do nothing. But doing nothing is not neutral, since it triggers a default bias. That means that “no choice” is a choice itself. There’s is no neutral, even, or especially, in non action. Despite the claims of many, technology is never neutral. Even when you don’t choose what to do with it, it chooses. A system acquires a definite drift and clear momentum from those inherent biases, whether or not we act upon them. The best we can do is nudge it.

I think it becomes obvious that our “defaults” as producers and artists – while not controlling the use or interpretation of our work – definitely carry implications to audiences. We want people to take it a certain way, even if that certain way is “to keep an open mind and not assume it only has one meaning.” This is one of many ways in which the presentation space – physical, acoustic, visual, etc. – profoundly influences audience experiences. Think of the difference between taking in a movie passively on a small laptop screen while simultaneously facebooking/twittering/youtubing  around and actually taking the trek downtown to that little theater that plays the independent films on a huge screen with warm projected light beaming through always high-resolution analog film (thanks to Read Schuchardt from his thoughts on this topic). Each format “wants” something different from you – and your behavior as a viewer trends toward that demand, even or especially through inaction (as Kelly points out, on a more general basis). This relates directly to whether we will use technology as it is handed to us, or make something else out of it – whether we will shape the tool, or be shaped by it.

For more from Kevin Kelly, watch his TED talk from several years back on the evolution of technology:

One scholar who has been particularly helpful to me in exploring the idea of alternative futures is Dipesh Chakrabarty. As part of the subaltern studies group, Chakrabarty’s work explores some very exciting ideas (at least to me, the guy with the history degree). One of his arguments in Provincializing Europe (one of my top reads this year) is that a system of evaluating history from a deterministic perspective runs aground when applied to reality. The fact that people live in radically different ways now, and have lived in radically different ways in the past, gives a model of an alternative approach to reality – not just a “backward” or “undeveloped” one, since many of these approaches to reality are aimed at dealing with the contemporary world without being overcome by it.

In ae, a growing topic of conversation is how to learn to swim in the heavy seas of an environment of technology – to avoid being dragged underneath and made the slaves of whatever tides of invention and technologization come our way. Presuming that there is only one possible future (an androidic singularity of post-biological humanity bound together with self-perpetuating machinery) is precisely the type of assumption that, because it does not allow for alternatives, should make us extremely suspicious.

Then the question becomes How? The current drive toward “the” singularity is guided by the imaginations of many people – whether inventors, science fiction authors, theoreticians, etc. – who envision this goal, and work toward its inception. An alternative future would be one that begins with an alternative vision: a different hope for the direction of human life. We rely on artists and thinkers of great visionary capability to enable us to achieve expanded, multiform, adaptive, transcendent goals. One of the remarkable “functions” of art is to enable us to see differently, to recognize something for the first time that may have been in front of us our whole lives, or even to take us into completely uncharted territory – the unprecedented experiences which can only be compared to other unprecedented experiences (as Elaine Scarry beautifully writes about in On Beauty and Being Just). Analogous to Chakrabarty’s approach, Scarry sees a dual movement within a person in an encounter with beauty: “...the way beautiful things have a forward momentum, the way they incite the desire to bring new things into the world: infants, epics, sonnets, drawings, dances, laws, philosophic dialogues, theological tracts. But we soon found ourselves also turning backward, for the beautiful faces and songs that lift us forward onto new ground keep calling out to us as well, inciting us to rediscover and recover them in whatever new thing gets made” (page 46).

Into this conversation enters the Cube – or at least, its pre-conception form. How might we engage in visual and aural art that reconnects us to each other, and not just to a central computer? How might a massive, immersive film experience enable us to escape the deterministic vision of the future from within the same technology usually wedded to those ideological purposes? I suppose this makes it easy to see why this isn’t a direct-to-market idea! The means matter to such as extent that the ends have no existence without them. Part of the “fruit” imagined as a result of experiences in the Cube would be critical reflection on the mediated life – basically, on the technological experience just encountered, as contrasted with the artistic experience breathed through the technological. Without this vigorous paradox, the Cube will be uselessly swallowed into rising tide of gray goo.

Something that is core to what we’re doing with Artistic Energies is to engage in the conversation concerning the direction of humanity, broadly speaking, in relation to technology. To be frank, we’re very critical of the transhumanistic prophecy of the singularity. It’s not that we’re Luddites, per se (we’re working on immersive film technologies, for goodness sake), it’s just that any vision of the future that presumes to be total and inevitable fails the test of human creativity. It seems that, rather than the impersonal positivistic interpretations of scientific advancement, we ought to be acknowledging the personal, communal, imaginative interpretations (a la Thomas Kuhn’s Structures of Scientific Revolutions). In other words, we pursue in practice what we have discovered already in our imaginations.

Our vision of the future, based in our imaginations’ strength and breadth, will be the guide to our actions. Something that art and beauty do for us (in particular instances, not as abstract, free-floating concepts) is to enable us to recognize our errors about beauty and justice (Elaine Scarry), expand our consciousness in healthy ways (Harold Bloom – The Art of Reading Poetry), and serve as continually generative, life-giving, paradigm-challenging sources of renewal (Scott Cairns, and a bit of Bloom and Scarry too). In other words, beauty is one of the ways in which we re-evaluate what we’ve thought to be true. What if, for lack of “tough beauty”, our systems and our goals as human beings go completely unchallenged? This sounds like death to me, not life.

My recent conversations on this topic reminded me, for some reason, of Goethe’s Farbenkreis (see image above) – his alternative to Newton’s spectral theory of color. Our scientific instruments are, obviously and rightly, calibrated to deal with the spectrum of radiation. Goethe’s model, on the other hand, is “calibrated” to deal with the artistic phenomenon of pigment mixing – such that violet is included in the circle, rather than located on the extreme ends of the Newtonian spectrum. Which one is right? As scientists figuring out the chemical composition of stars, the Newtonian model (leaving aside the wave-particle duality issue); but as painters, designers, and so on, the Goethean model.