I just spent a grey Sunday at the museum and therefore my life feels wholesome, filled with mild intellectual stimulation. I also now feel entitled to give my opinion on the exhibition that I just saw (which my dad’s bff suggested).
The exhibition in question is The Future Starts Here at the Victoria and Albert Museum. And the bff in question is a very opinionated political strategist. The stakes were high. But the timing of my visit was even more interesting, after spending four days with my friend, Rudy.
Rudy teaches a course called Trend Watching at the University of Tilburg. I met him last year at the London Design Fair where he took his students onto a mission to haunt what’s trending in the design world. I met him up again in the middle of this year’s chaotic Design Week to chat about topics like culture management and trend forecasting. It was such an educational pub conversation that I could barely stop myself from asking for further resources.
As a “macro trend”, my outlook on the future has been changing. I’m becoming more and more optimistic towards the progression of civilisation, science, technology, and even the spiritual knowledge of humanity. Being aware of trends on different levels makes me more objective towards them. It reminds me that every generation is fitter than the previous, and every era faces new challenges relying on a larger accumulative wisdom and therefore is more progressive. This conclusion is made on such a larger scale. And in conclusion, these various waves of trend manifestations ultimately lead to an undeniably idealistic future scenario.
This mindset brought me to The Future Starts Here, which shares a similar optimistic future projection, in my opinion. The exhibition is structured in the form of questions, which I think was a very smart choice, that are:
We are all connected, but do we feel lonely?
Does democracy still work?
Is Edward Snowden a hero or a traitor?
Should the planet be a design project?
If Mars is the answer, what is the question?
Who wants to live forever?
(Under the title AFTERLIFE)
Here are a few pieces that caught my attention:
Incarnated for disclosing classified information to Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning could not be photographed while in prison. These portraits were generated using only her genetic information, extracted and interpreted from hair trimmings and cheek swabs. Until her release in May 2017, these were the only public images of Manning following her gender transition in 2016. The portrait is composed of two faces, each showing nuance in gender. They reveal the wealth of information available in the smallest traces if our bodies.
When worn in the sun for an hour, this shirt can generate enough electricity to charge a smartphone. Flexible solar cells are integrated into the fabric of the garment, creating a portable power source that harnesses the sun’s energy. Electricity can be stored in the shirt’s battery pack, located in the front pocket. As we become more dependent on digital devices, this shirt suggests a future where our bodies are intertwined with technology.
Smart devices are usually triggered for functional purposes. This project explores their potential to represent emotional states and life stories. The four smart curtains are linked to the bed and phone of Oumarou Idrissa, a young man from Niger who lives and works as an Uber driver in Los Angeles. Every time Idrissa wakes up in the middle of the night and WhatsApps his family back home, taps Uber, or uses Instagram, one of the curtains opens. This installation is accompanied by texts written by its creator, artist and filmmaker Miranda July.
Each time the brown curtain opens, Oumarou has opened WhatsApp — the free, secure, worldwide messaging service. Every night around 11pm he begins to talk and message with his friends and family in Niger. ‘I don’t have any close friends in America’, he told me, ‘so my phone is my everything’. He exchanges videos and pictures with his 21 sisters and brothers and responds to requests for money, most often to pay for food, school tuitions, christenings and medicine. He used to talk to his mom every night, but she passed away two years ago. Just before she died, Oumarou texted to me she was sick. We had sporadically kept in touch after our long drive together. Just a few hours later he texted me that she had died, and he was headed back to Niger for her funeral.
Herbert Bayer was fascinated by dream imagery and the surreal quality that could be achieved by photomontage. Here the artist’s eyes stare from the palms of his hands, floating mysteriously in the courtyard of a Berlin apartment block. The image is almost 100 years old, but its evocation of the psychological realities of modernity, and the loneliness that can be experienced in highly populated cities, still resonates today.
71-year-old Cindy lost the full use of her limbs following complications from a severe heart attack. While waiting for her new robotic prosthetic, Cindy improvised ‘object hacks’ to help her with everyday tasks that she now found impossible. These adaptations to the most commonly used objects in her home allowed her to hold cutlery, play cards, brush her teeth, read the newspaper and much more. Design educators Sara Hendren and Caitrin Lynch documented Cindy’s hacks ‘to illustrate new ways of understanding who can engineer, what counts as engineering and why this matters.’ The project reminds us that the best innovations are not necessarily high-tech, and that technologies are valuable for their social function or ability to empower us, not just for their precision or sleek appearance.
Hidden inside the panda are shredded government documents and a memory card with information leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden. A project between the artists and political activists Ai Weiwei and Jacob Appelbaum, a number of these toys were sent to political dissidents around the world for safeguarding, creating a ‘distributed backup’. As Appelbaum explains ‘the safest place to put these things is in a museum, a gallery, where it’s protected as an object’.
The main argument The Future Starts Here is that the world of tomorrow is shaped by the designs and technologies emerging today. But the progression of technology cannot be separated from its intent and therefore comes with a huge potential for destruction. Therefore it’s our responsibility as humans to forecast the consequences when integrating emerging technologies into our lives. All this is well and reasonable of course.
However, I do think that this is a bit of a naive approach, because we as individuals have less conscious impact in trends this macro than we think. As Rudy was explaining to me, each trend, regardless of its scale, manifests with multiple and simultaneous counter trends. The combination of this dialectic is the only translation of the trend that becomes the foundation of the coming trends.
All in all, this was a nicely curated, nicely narrated exhibition with interesting arguments and an engaging tone. I also enjoyed the overall presentation; colours, materials, and spatial arrangement, even though the ever-present dystopian music on the background was a bit too much. And in any case, start paying attention to trends around us shaped by emerging technologies and human inventions, so that we’ll have more influence over them than they have over us.
Finally, I’ve made a list of further reading. Here it is:
P.S. Two things. One; I’m also reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and this couldn’t be a better company to all this future thinking mania. And two; I just listened to an interview of Tim Ferriss, where he said “Love comes from acceptance, not understanding.” Love.
