Posts filed under 'culture'
“We are where we are”
Rachel Kelnar writes:
I went to two really interesting futures events last week and was struck by the extent to which some emerging learnings were common to both, despite having expected beforehand that the topics would have little in common.
First, I attended a debate at the London Transport Museum (LTM) on the future of transport – ‘Survive or Thrive: What will urban life be like in 2055?’ The LTM used the intelligent infrastructure scenarios which my colleague Andrew Curry and I wrote for the UK Government’s Foresight Programme as the starting point for this discussion. I also participated in ‘Museums in the Long Now’ – a roundtable exploring the future of the museum, organised by the Cultural Leadership Programme at City University and Compton Verney, with funding from the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise (LCACE).
An emerging theme of both sessions was ‘we are where we are’ – that if we were to design a transport system for the UK, we would not set out to design what we currently have, and neither would we fund or develop our museums in the way we do now. However, ‘we are where we are’ – and we therefore have to temper our views of the future with the reality of this starting point. We don’t have the luxury of a blank slate.
However, it’s important that this doesn’t limit us in terms of what we strive for, and both sessions used scenarios to help participants resist the temptation to think too short term, or too negatively.
Another interesting reflection for me was the potentially changing role of museums. They are generally considered windows to the past and this is pretty uncontroversial. But, if museums are to remain relevant in the future, they perhaps need to do more than reflect on what has already happened. They need to start providing a window on the future as well. The LTM has certainly embraced this idea, with the Future Generator, which allows every virtual or real museum visitor to explore how their choices can impact the future of London and the type of city we will all live in. It’s about putting the Museum at the heart of the debate about our transport system, sustainability and the London we might have in 2055, and pleasingly, it’s also based on the scenarios we were involved in writing.
Discussing the Museum of the Long Now, it became increasingly clear that many museums may well be a natural home for such futures exploration. They are naturally places where people go to learn – to be challenged, provoked, and to understand a culture, a society or a particular event in our history. This mindset is a good one for thinking about the future of our culture and our society – because thinking about the past is the first step to thinking more effectively about the future.
This shift is not without its challenges – it requires, for example, that museums get a bit more comfortable with conflict than many are at the moment. If museums can successfully place themselves at the heart of our future – regardless of the issue – than they are helping to cement their role in our lives going forward. We are where we are – but we don’t have to be stuck here.
1 comment 25 June 2008
Liverpool Street freeze
The Liverpool Street Freeze was a few weeks ago now, but Denise’s post somehow got lost in the machine. Better late than never.
Denise Hicks writes:
Flash mobbing and its variations, such as ImprovEverywhere, have been around anecdotally for years now, but I’d never participated in one – believing that it was the preserve of the select few. Although there was an air of irreverent young trendies about the Liverpool Street Freeze, what surprised me was the inclusivity and breadth of the nature of participation. Alongside the BAPE-clad creative types with oversized headphones sat elderly women in mid-page turn of their daily paper, city types with briefcases stopped in mid-swing and construction workers pre-coffee gulp.
Preceding the Freeze was a strange sense of the anticipation of performance, but years of training on the underground have helped to perfect the art of being motionless and devoid of expression. As I stood, there was a strange sensation of being connected to the many people around, all with the same purpose and associated anticipation and sense of breaking the rules, doing something different, and yet you’re still anonymous to one another. It’s refreshingly uncomplicated in a world of hi-tech and complex ‘connections’.
While it would have been more poetic to end the four minutes as subtly and as nonchalantly as we’d begun, the Freezers couldn’t resist acknowledging the sense of achievement with a round of applause. Even for those of us who believed it should have ended in silence, leaving the viewers dumbfounded, we were secretly sharing in the celebration that for four minutes, we’d turned just another day into an extraordinary day and given hundreds of people something to talk about.
Add comment 3 June 2008
The power of ‘we’
Becky Rowe writes:
I’ve been in Australia for a few days for a client project and one of things I have noticed (aside from the jetlag and great weather) is the constant reference across all kinds of public communications to ‘us’, ‘we’, ‘together’, ‘you’, and ‘community’.
New building projects mention ‘helping our communities grow stronger’, while ‘no alcohol’ signs on the beaches explain why it is beneficial to everyone if you don’t drink your beers on the beach. The taxi rank at the airport had a large sign which communicated clearly and simply what you could ask of your taxi driver, and what he could expect of you (you are entitled to ask your driver to turn on or off the radio or aircon, and to take a different route, but you aren’t allowed to be drink or eat in the cab).
The prevalence of these signs, the explicit wording, and clear reference to shared responsibilities, all communicated in a friendly and understandable way, somehow surprised me. In some ways I found them a bit patronising, but I also found it refreshing to have ‘the rules’ of ‘good citizenship’ made clear.
Knowing the rationale behind an apparently bureacratic or even irrational rule can make all the difference to compliance. I think the UK has something to learn from the Australians about how to behave – and how to get people to behave.
1 comment 15 May 2008
Can the arts cure cancer?
Rachel Kelnar writes:
While teaching part of a module on “Planning for the Future”, part of City University’s Cultural Leadership programme, I was struck by a provocative comment from one of the participants, which led to an energetic discussion.
We were exploring future challenges for the arts sector, and someone said, “Soon, the arts will be expected to cure cancer.” While there was clearly some irony intended, it highlighted that we might have reached a critical point in the debate about instrumentalism in the arts. There’s been quite a long policy trend about developing the arts on the basis of how they can advance particular social or policy aims, but Brian McMaster’s recent report, Supporting Excellence might be a sign that this is coming to an end.
McMaster’s report was commissioned by the previous Culture Secretary, James Purnell, and it has certainly injected energy into this debate – but we’ll have to wait to see whether his replacement has the same appetite for his argument.
Add comment 6 March 2008
Unravelling the cassette
Stacey Yates writes:
The audio cassette is 45 years old this year, and is reaching the end of its life, at least in Europe and the US. It peaked in the 1980s, but started to decline after the CD was rolled out in 1993. As our music consumption becomes increasingly intangible, people are pointing to some of the pleasures of more tangible forms – as a amusing post at the design blog Core 77 recently reminded me: the cassette as a design convention.
In contrast to the age of digital, the cassette was a lo-fi, low tech object and it was the first hard format to emerge in response to a more mobile society – the age of the Walkman preceded the iPod generation by 25 years. It could get stuck down the back of your sofa or crammed into your banger’s glove compartment for months, and you knew you could still rely on it to work when you found it again. Unlike the CD, it was near unbreakable and was always ready to play just where you left off. If it did get a bit chewed up, all you needed was a pencil or a biro to sort it.
The one time you might have been precious about a cassette was when you made a mix tape. In the 1980s creating a mix tape for someone was an act of dedication. Sitting through selected tapes with your finger hovering above the pause button took time and choosing the right mix of songs took creativity. The mix tape could also be a personal selection, creating a whole new way to mix and match music that has been reinforced by the rise of the celebrity DJ and by digital music. But let’s face it, there’s no romance in a USB stick. So perhaps it’s not surprising to find a site which, perhaps cunningly, is selling the ease of the digital ‘mix-stick’ - but in a package which offers all the personalisation that you used to get from the cassette.
Image © Stacey Yates
[Correction: A typo above has the CD launched, incorrectly, in 1993. In fact, it was launched commercially in Europe and the USA in 1983 (late 1982 in Japan). Thanks to Harry, in Comments, below, for pointing this out.]
6 comments 5 March 2008
Grand Central Station freeze out
Andrew Curry writes:
Is it an event? Is it an experience? Is it play? Is it participation? Is it performance? Probably all five. ImprovEverywhere’s recent two hundred person ‘freeze’ at Grand Central Station is another example of the type of shared participatory private-but-public moment which is enabled by digital media – and amplified by it, through YouTube and Flickr.
Watching the video, I was also reminded of the work of the sociologist Harold Garfinkel, who combined ethnography and social sciences research to test how people constructed meaning, sometimes with not so hilarious results. (In one famous experiment, in an age when the ethical limits on research were, well, looser, he sent students home for the vacation with the instruction to treat their family home as a boarding house. Quite a few got thrown out.)
The Grand Central Station freeze lasted for only five minutes, but in less than that time passers-by have moved from confusion to interpretation to action – and the two minute video catches this whole process brilliantly.
[Thx to Core 77 for the tip]
Add comment 6 February 2008
The lure of celebrity
Andrew Curry writes:
I think we sometimes under-estimate the power of the relationship between our increasingly audio-visual world and the rise of celebrity culture. And the second part of this story is about the way in which media coverage of celebrity is a classic form of ‘reveal and conceal’ narrative, where the audience is simultaneously invited into this world of money and power and exclusivity and also excluded from it. Media empires have been built in the space between knowing and not knowing. Some of the sharpest commentary on this world has been in the work of the artist Alison Jackson, who works with celebrity lookalikes. TED.com has just posted a revealing lecture she gave in Oxford three years ago. It runs just under 20 minutes – and some of the images she uses to illustrate her talk are not for the easily shocked.
The picture at the top is a publicity still for Jackson’s Channel 4 film, Blaired Vision, shown last year. She’s interviewed about it here. And yes, that is a Blair lookalike: she’s currently looking for Gordon Browns for her latest project, apparently.
Add comment 29 January 2008
