Not only Umberto Boccioni has a name that reminds me of pasta but he is a complete genius. #futuristartist
Dynamism of a soccer player, 1913 @MOMA
“In this work a soccer player dematerializes into a luminous and flickering atmosphere, save for his firmly sculpted calf at center. Here Boccioni offers a demonstration of a principle he articulated in his 1910 text “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting”: “To paint a human figure you must not paint it; you must render the whole of its surrounding atmosphere…movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies.” With stippled brushwork and kaleidoscopic color, the work communicates the spirited energy of youthful athlete”
Afghan War Reflects Changes in Air War - CJ Chivers via NYTimes.com
The new air war is where the fighter jets are adopting a Tai Chi attitude instead of Mixed Martial Arts brutalism:
CJ Chivers via NYTimes.com
The use of air power has changed markedly during the long Afghan conflict, reflecting the political costs and sensitivities of civilian casualties caused by errant or indiscriminate strikes and the increasing use of aerial drones, which can watch over potential targets for extended periods with no risk to pilots or more expensive aircraft.
Fighter jets with pilots, however, remain an essential component of the war, in part because little else in the allied arsenal is considered as versatile or imposing, and because of improvements in the aircraft’s sensors.
Commander McDowell’s career has followed the arc of this changing role. At the outset of the war in 2001, American aircraft often attacked in ways that maximized violence, including carpet bombing, dropping cluster munitions and conducting weeks of strikes with precision-guided munitions.
Flying in an F-14 squadron from the aircraft carrier Enterprise, then-Lieutenant McDowell dropped 6,000 pounds of munitions in the war’s first week, destroying Taliban aircraft and vehicles at Herat airfield and striking training camps and barracks in Kandahar Province.
He had already flown the past two years in Kosovo and Iraq, where in 32 combat sorties he dropped 35,000 pounds of guided munitions, including on Serbian barracks that were struck when the largest number of soldiers were believed to be inside.
“Our culture is a fangs-out, kill-kill-kill culture,” he said. “That’s how we train. And back then, the mind-set was: maximum number of enemy killed, maximum number of bombs on deck, to achieve a maximum psychological effect.”
That was then. A little more than a decade on, his most common mission is what is called an “overwatch,” scanning the ground via infrared sensors and radioing what he sees to troops below.
The next transition will be to get the pilot out of the plane, and make it a very large, very capable drone. Jet fighters could be made considerably cheaper if they didn’t have to be designed for people to steer them, and they could pull G forces greater than people can tolerate.
Imagine a single operate controlling a flock of jet drones, where the hivemind logoc of the drones allows them to ‘flock’ while the human controller decides what direction to travel, generally.
It’s been shown that flocks of birds and schools of fish react more quickly and more accurately to threats than the individuals would if alone. Humans can’t do that in squads of jets, but we could build flocks of jet drones that could. And also drone tanks, or ‘trones’.
The future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.
(Source: foreignpolicy.com)
[Arthur C] Clarke says that if you find a prediction reasonable, than it is probably wrong, because the future is not reasonable; it is fantastic! But if you could return from the future with the exact truth about what will happen, no one would believe you because the future is too fantastic! By fantastic he means issuing from the realm of fantasy and the imagination — beyond what we expect.
This is the futurist’s dilemma: Any believable prediction will be wrong. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable. Either way, a futurist can’t win. He is either dismissed or wrong.
Except if he hits that razor’s edge between the two realms, right on the cusp between plausibility and fantasy, where it is almost true in the improbable future. This is the sweet spot that science fiction authors aim for. Occasionally one hits it. Like Arthur C. Clarke.
Getting it right is very, very difficult. Most people, particularly most smart people, even most science fiction authors, will err on the side of not being fantastical enough. Because absolutely no one wants to be dismissed. What’s the point of making a prediction if no one is listening? So 99% of future predictions will fall short of the necessary unreasonableness for a correct prediction.
Open the Future: The Foresight Paradox
Jamais Cascio lays out the core paradox of futurism:
In every foresight or forecasting exercise, there are two overarching tensions:
- The more certain and detailed the forecast, the more people will accept it and believe it to be useful.
- The more certain and detailed the forecast, the less likely it is to happen.
This is the foresight paradox: you can be completely accurate, or you can be completely engaging, but you can’t be both. As a result, every forecast (or scenario, or prediction) has to find the right balance between the two, trading off likelihood for believability.
How to bridge this seeming divide? Cascio — like me and others — thinks the best solution is to contrive a set of scenarios, 3-5 for example, that frame some business issue or market direction.This comes with its own set of problems, such as the getting people to consider a ‘field’ of alterntiaves, and to gain some insight from that in a world crammed with other things to think about.
Specifically, Jamais points out that this approach is becoming increasingly impractical in conferences, given the recent trend toward very short presentations:
There seems to be a trend in conferences right now (especially in Europe) to limit presentations to 15 minutes. Although there are definite benefits to this approach (most notably in maintaining audience interest), it means that any foresight-based presentation is crippled. A speaker simply doesn’t have the time to offer multiple scenarios in anything other than a bullet point/headline format, surrounded by lots of big idea framing to give the scenario headlines some context (the talk I gave at the Guardian Activate Summit in London last year is probably my best effort at doing this).
Unfortunately, audiences don’t respond as well to multiple scenarios as they do to single, detailed forecasts, even when they know the detailed forecasts will inevitably be wrong. Moreover, appearances limited by time (such as, in particular, television) make even the headline scenario approach difficult. The best one can do — in my experience, at least, and I’d love to hear better suggestions — is to be sure to offer caveats and use cautious language such as “appears to,” “likely,” and especially “one possibility” (or similar statements underlining that different outcomes are possible).
The modern spectacle-driven media loathes uncertainty, and will almost always give more attention to aggressive certitude (no matter the accuracy) than caution. Many business audiences feel the same way. Sadly, the foresight paradox boils down to this:
The futurists who get the most attention are usually the least accurate.
Snap.
The one scenario not conceived of as remotely likely by any faction of futurians—the reverse really of all their competing auguries—is the possibility, and then the final achievement, of a generous and benevolent One World government, solving humankind’s problems and adjudicating its disputes through the consent of the governed. The end of capitalism and its plutocrats and bought politicians. An antique among futures, that one, and impossible to envision on any grounds: political, economic, sociological, or simply the ground of basic human nature. So that will be it. The future will consist of a new kind of universal anarcho-totalitarian system which is, on the whole, pretty successful at fostering human happiness and diversity as well as ensuring social justice and welfare. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs: Karl Marx’s formulation has always applied very well to individual families—it’s how the best-run families function—but in the future it will define the Family of Man. Immanuel Kant’s distinction between public and private, which is exactly opposite to the one in common use today, will then be universal: the private is the particular ethnic, religious, political, clan, or company loyalties we own; when we are public we engage the world and one another with the tools of a plain reasoning that belongs to us all and commands the assent of all.
As the noted SF writer and poet Tom Disch made clear in his 1999 book The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, the tropes developed in science fiction since 1900—alien invasions, telepathy, time travel, people-shaped robot helpers, travel to other planets, nuclear mutants, flying cars, immortality—are now universal in the culture without actually having come much closer in actuality, or even appearing at all. Meanwhile SF kept missing the things that in fact would happen. Disch’s own best novel, 334, published in 1974 and predicting the world of 2025, entirely missed the digital age just then dawning—not computers, which everyone knew would rule the world, but the universal accessibility of them, our ever-present freedoms and enchainments. But then almost every writer did. By the time William Gibson set his cyberpunk novels in a digital future, it had already come to be.
2019: A Future Imagined
Visual Futurist Syd Mead (“Blade Runner,” “Aliens,” “Tron”) reflects upon the nature of creativity and how it drives the future. This featurette provides insight into the fascinating mind of one of the most influential artists of modern cinema and transportation design. Mead discusses how design, mobility and creative innovation will shape future cities. [via Tribeca Film Institute]
The past is the new future.
During a summer in the late 1960s I discovered an easy and certain method of predicting the future. Not my own future, the next turn of the card, or market conditions next month or next year, but the future of the world lying far ahead. It was quite simple. All that was needed was to take the reigning assumptions about what the future was likely to hold, and reverse them. Not modify, negate, or question, but reverse. It was self-evident that this was the right method, because so many of the guesses that the past had made about its then future—that is, my own present—had turned out to be not only wrong but the opposite of what came to be instead, the more so the further ahead they had been projected.
Postcards From The Future
reblogged from Infranet Lab
[Scenario: The iconic City office tower is now high-rise housing. Originally converted into luxury flats, the block soon slid down the social scale to become a high-density, multi-occupation tower block. The Gherkin now worries the authorities as a potential slum. Refugees from equatorial lands have moved north in search of food. They make their homes in the buildings that once drove world finance – before the collapse of the global economy. Image © Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones.]
A current exhibition at the Museum of London entitled ‘Postcards from the Future’ attempts to imagine how climate change will affect London. The illustrators, Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones touch on issues such as the food crisis, rising sea levels, informal housing, etc. to give a vision for types of adaptation.
[Scenario: As the Gulf Stream slows a mini ice-age brings temporary relief to heat-weary Londoners. Winter skating becomes London’s most popular sport and Tower Bridge is a favourite spot. The scene harks back to the 17th century when artists loved to paint London’s Frost Fairs. Then, the Thames froze over because the river flowed sluggishly. Now, the river flows quickly but every winter the temperature falls to new lows. Image © Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones. Background photography © Jason Hawkes]
There are a few observations that can be deduced upon examination of the postcards. Firstly, the city will be succeeded by ‘nature’, further blurring the boundaries of the contemporary metropolis. Secondly, infrastructure and (select) monuments will be some of the last remaining elements in such a metropolis; and thirdly, that housing will take the form of dense informal settlements or ‘slums’. If one were to use these postcards as warnings, they would suggest more current design emphasis on infrastructural deployment, housing, and incorporating productive nature into the city. More importantly, the extreme visions reveal a lack of resilience in the city.
[Scenario: Buckingham Palace shanty town. The climate refugee crisis reaches epic proportions. The vast shanty town that stretches across London’s centre leaves historic buildings marooned, including Buckingham Palace. The Royal family is surrounded in their London home. Everybody is on the move and the flooded city centre is now uninhabitable and empty – apart from the thousands of shanty-dwellers. But should empty buildings and land be opened up to climate refugees? Image © Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones. Background photography © Jason Hawkes]
While these images are certainly provocative, they give little evidence of actual researched scenarios of climate change. The two typical depictions of such crises often are utterly utopian or dystopian (think archigram vs. archizoom), both of which are problematic. It is difficult for all to understand the exact ramifications of climate change, and that being said, I am interested on the role of nature and infrastructure depicted within these images. ‘Nature’ is presented as a violent force (ice, floods) or a productive element (the rice paddies, tidal energy), both of which co-exist within dense urbanity. Infrastructure is rendered as a centralized point condition (Kew Nuclear Power Station) or as a distributed field (Tidal/ Wind) in the absence of people (through the photomontages). These various depictions of both nature and infrastructure not only exist today but also are fairly traditional. Some of the more innovative postcards examine the merging of nature, infrastructure and the public in new ways. In this regard, the distributed field of infrastructure and the productive use of nature are interesting because they both embrace a larger surface condition, and therefore a notion of landscape. But this isn’t a picturesque or formal landscape of the English or French Gardens; it is a multivalent condition that could provide more resilience to the future metropolis.
[Scenario: Thames Tidal Power. The river remains a focus of power generation, just as it was for the great coal-powered power stations of old. Around the old Thames Barrier a number of new tidal power stations are using the tidal flows up and down the Thames to generate electricity for thousands of London businesses and homes. Image © Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones. Background photography © Jason Hawkes]
The provocative images are on display from October 2010 to March 2011.
[Scenario: Parliament Square rice paddies. This view across Parliament Square shows paddy fields running up to the walls of the Palace of Westminster. The land that once housed political protest is now part of the city’s food production effort. In this scenario London has adapted to rising water tables in radical ways. Managed flooding is now the name of the game, as is self-sufficiency in food. Central London is a network of rice paddies – and Londoners’ diet is largely rice-based. Image © Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones.]
The Future Freight Flows team at MIT use GBN Scenario Planning
The Future Freight Flows team at CTL has developed four future scenarios: Millions of Markets, Global Marketplace, Naftastique!, and One World Order. They were developed over the course of a year through a series of focused expert panel sessions, practitioner acid testing, and industry wide surveys. The key driving forces and critical uncertainties were identified and formed the basis of the underlying scenarios. While originally designed to be used for freight transportation planning, they can be employed for a wide variety of different planning purposes.
Interesting that MIT is also using scenario planning in research projects. The insights are gradually oozing into the academic areas. It might open up some doors for scenario planning in other institutions as well. Maybe it is an opportunity to start a Scenario Planning Institute (c f Thomas Chermack’s effort) at Chalmers/University of Göteborg?
Wayyyy too sunny. These are minor variations on the same theme of trade populism — where nations either reject the flat world hypothesis or embrace it. There are no collapse scenarios, and aside from minor shifts in agricultural production, global warming hasn’t really happened.
The world isn’t one canvas, with one painting spread across it. More likely are a thousand small stories like The California Territory, where localized decisions roll up into a crazy quilt world.
