So I'm very glad to introduce our next speaker. This is Tim Boykett from Time's Up. Time's Up is based in Linz, has been existing for a long time, since 1996 actually, and I always really like to say this self described laboratory for the construction of experimental situations I think this is, it's a beautiful way to describe it, so Time's Up is creating immersive environment, physical narration and thinking very much about the future and what we want to bring into the future and how that could feel and especially also how would you deal with it in a fictive space? So yeah, give it away. Thank you very much. First, apologies from Tina who was hoping to be here with me. So this is my invisible colleague, Tina. She had some things come up in the meantime and wasn't able to be here with me. So this is my invisible colleague, Tina. She had some things come up in the meantime and wasn't able to be here. But at least yesterday we got to watch a bunch of 12-year-old schoolchildren do a theatre performance based on a workshop we did around imagining living in 2047, which was quite fun and quite funny. It was quite lovely. So, yes, we got to see that together. Now I'll be speaking myself. So I'm sort of presenting something that we worked out how to speak about together, but just me. So I might fumble a few times. I'm going to read a couple of things out loud as we go through. I'll make up some of the bits as we go along. Hopefully it makes sense. Who's someone who's got really bad English who says I'm speaking too fast? I'm speaking too fast? Good. Can you raise your hand, do the same thing if I get carried away again? If I start gabbling, you have to like wave at me and tell me to slow down and calm down a bit. So, time's up. Yes, we are a, we've been around for a very long time. We're artists and we're designers and carpenters and welders and mathematicians and sociologists, and we've got a very undisciplined way of looking at the world, which is a lot of fun. We're interested in environmental issues and social issues and the way they interplay and how we can talk about them. Really enjoyed this whole idea of how to learn to talk about things out loud and to think out loud with each other. That's one of the things that we're really trying to do. We're very interested in using physical spaces and physical thinking and being an environment to help us think because just sitting around and talking about what we think we're thinking is good but actually being able to hold something in your hands one of the great things about amro is lots of workshops where you actually have a thing in your hands helps us to think better we're very interested in building like spaces to be able to do things in and to think out loud in um we like people to play in these spaces we like to have this very um people to come and explore things when they come into one of our spaces to sort of not have a predefined idea of this is the message we're trying to convey, but a whole bunch of possibilities and to invite sort of exploration and this whole sort of question of engagement. Engagements are really, is that flicking through? Yes, it is. So people getting excited and finding a whole bunch of things that we didn't know about when we built something is when we think we're doing things nicely. So it's very much about one-to-one, like, full-scale things. We've been doing a bit of cheating where we'll build models of things and let you look through a hole as if it's an actual world behind the peephole, but mostly we're interested in actual physical stuff. We're interested in play because we think that and we understand that when kids learn, they do it best through play. Play is the work of the child. And as adults, we should let ourselves play a lot more. One of my other hats is to be a mathematician. Mathematicians get to play all the time. It's fantastic. We get to make shit up and just see what happens. Tom Toffoli, an engineer, scientist, physicist who visited us years ago, popped out the quotable quote that we turned into a T-shirt, that science is the stories that scientists tell about the games that scientists play. Play is something that's very fundamental. The other thing that's very fundamental is people tell stories. Our ways of understanding the world are through story, whether it's talking about gods and demons and goddesses and Gaeic power or electrons and neutrons and waves moving through some ether or non-ether or however else we explain things to each other. We have these stories. We're very good at understanding story and especially about personal relationship to things. So narrative is vitally important. And the third thing that we'd like to bring into our work is talking about possible futures, not the future. If someone tells you what the future is going to be, like that big thick book from Al Gore, he's doing a con job, he's trying to sell you something something but if someone's talking to you about possible futures and encouraging you to think about the way that your future might be in those possible futures maybe there's something serious going on there that we don't need to worry about um so a bit of linguistics who here is not a native german speaker that's good. There's a word in German, Zimmer, which means a room. So this is a Zimmer. And so there's this sort of word that we've sort of made up, Verzimmern, that doesn't really exist, but it comes from the word for room. And a Zimmerer is someone who builds a room, like a carpenter who builds houses and things. So Verzimmern is a word that we use to talk about building a space that conveys an idea, whether it's a story, a possible world, a possible future, a possible past. And we're going to pretend that the word fidziman exists in English because roomify is a really sort of quite average, quite crappy interpreter translation. So, fidziman, is that OK? We'll stick with that one. And we sort of based one of our sort of working hypotheses is by Fitzsimmering a possible future or acting out a possible future, like pre-hearsing it, enacting it in some way, prefiguring a possible future is a way of getting a really good hand on what that possible future might mean. And by actually diving into it as a Zimmer and doing it sort of playfully and exchanging stories about how we think it's working, we in the sense of people who are in the space, you actually get to sort of have a much more deep and interesting and vital connection to it. Playful exploratory, yada, yada, yada. Very much based on this idea, so I'm sure we've all heard the I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand, which may or may not be Confucius or someone in the 60s or a whole bunch of other people. This idea, I hear futures and I forget, I see futures. So there's just a lot of this idea about building pictures of possible futures, like the artist's representation of something is maybe memorable, but by actually going out and doing the future, whether it's for a couple of minutes over dinner or spending a couple of hours wandering around an exhibition, you actually begin to understand what's going on there. So what have we got here? Ah, good. So one of the things about immersive spaces is that they're usually bigger than one person which means that they are somehow intrinsically social you actually spend time in social spaces and as we know in the past couple of years we haven't been able to do this there's been a certain lack of social interaction um but we can remember when we arrive somewhere it's not often for us to arrive in a new town and want interaction. But we can remember when we arrive somewhere, it's not often for us to arrive in a new town and want to be alone. We go out and we spend time in public spaces, we get on public transport, we find a bar or a cafe or a public square or the edge of the river where we can sit and be near to people. And even if we're not actually interacting with people, there is something valuable about being surrounded by people. We're actually immersed in a group of people that are more or less like us, and we sort of have this immersion, this inclusion, this feeling like part of society. And there's an actual analysable difference between sitting at home with a couple of friends and watching a movie on your home theatre or your laptop or whatever, and actually going into a cinema and watching a movie on your home theatre or your laptop or whatever and actually going into a cinema and watching a movie with people. There are measurable long-term effects on our overall brain function, memory and focus that come out from spending time in public, even doing something as antisocial as watching a movie. And by being in these spaces, we actually get a lot of, like, everyday connections, really like this question about everyday life and how that interrelates with what we're doing, this interrelation with other people around us. And when we build our worlds, we often use this sort of.....this idea of everyday space and social space to really make that work better. So the place I want to talk about, Turnton, 2047, is an imagined world, 2047, 25 years into the future. It's a social space, it's a town somewhere on the edge of Europe, a coastal town. We don't define where in Europe it is, but we wanted to speak about this sort of liminal ocean land thing and the interrelations that were going on because of what we were doing. When you arrive in Turnton as a visitor to the exhibition, it's like coming into a new town. You sort of come off the pier or you come into town, however that is, and you see a whole bunch of public spaces and you find a bunch of elements that you try and work out how they sort of fit together. You might find a ferry stop. You've got, like here, a balloon that's parked in the middle of the square for some reason why is there a balloon parked there you can see interspaces but you can't really go into them there's a factory, there's a ferry stop there's the travel and thrive without borders it's very much recognisable so in the same way that whenever we go into a town let's just stick with sort of European towns because that's what we're most familiar with for most of us It's very much recognisable. So in the same way that whenever we go into a town, let's just stick with sort of European towns because that's what we're most familiar with for most of us, we sort of recognise what's going on. Richard Gott, who's a physicist who's still around, using what's called the Copernican principle, was trying to work out how long will the Berlin Wall be around for. And there's essentially an idea, and it comes down to a sort of statistical physics thing of pretending that I... or assuming that I'm not particularly important. And more or less his ideas say the longer something's been around for, the longer it's going to be around for. But there's a much more interesting way of looking at it if you're interested in those sorts of things. Really well-written paper that's worth reading. So one of the reasons for that is that Turnton is actually something that's quite timeless. Turnton is reasons for that is that Turnton is actually something that's quite timeless. Turnton is a place that you immediately recognise and feel familiar in because it looks like a town that we can imagine finding ourselves in. Where have we got to? Got to that. Ba-ba-ba-ba. So when we come into a physical narrative, physical narrative is a term that we're using to imagine a physical space that tells a story of some sort. So physical narrative seems to make sense. We invite people to come in and to explore it. They can hear things, they can smell things, you can see things, you can walk around on things, look into things, and you can create a whole bunch of different stories about how it might fit together. There's a lovely book from a fellow, Sam Gosling, who says that it's called Snoop, and it's about looking at people's stuff. And when you look, if you've got permission to look at someone's stuff, if you're, like, in their bedroom or in their office, then you can learn a lot about them just by looking at what's there. And there's sort of three types of stuff that he talks about. One is, if you come into my officey workspace there's the stuff that I've got there which helps me remind me who I am the things that I find valuable important there's the things that I've got in there which might be there to sort of like convey a sense of who I am to you as a visitor so I might have a I don't know my doctorate on the wall or something or rather come to a preview that I'm important or something like that. I don't know, whatever people have there, some prize they got, whatever it is. And then you've got your accidental self, all those things that tell someone about who you are when they pay attention that you didn't actually put there on purpose either for you or for them. And this is a really sort of interesting way of thinking about how to build a space to convey a story about a person by constructing what are they telling themselves, what are they trying to tell you, and what are they accidentally saying about themselves and the world they find themselves in when they're doing it. So here we've hopefully got a couple of images. We'll have to click this twice. It's not moving, is it? Is that moving? There we go, that's better. So, yeah, in Terton, we do this with a whole bunch of different pieces. We've got things like signs around the city, how to find things. We've got a cocktail bar. We've got graffiti. Luckily, the graffiti has always been extended. Like, once we open an exhibition, people come and add some graffiti to it. Sometimes within the story world, sometimes not quite. It's really quite lovely. We've got brochures and postcards. We've got adverts for things, all sorts of things that come up that convey the story of the town that you come into. And by exploring it, you can find things that are going on which are quite lovely, so things like these postcards. Everyone knows free cards, and so we have a bunch of postcards in there that tell stories about the way that people think in that world sort of things they might be having to talk about um getting past this superficial level we get into more and more levels of detail uh so this is the the town of turnton those we had in a couple different exhibitions we've had fragments of turnton that those we had in a couple of different exhibitions. We've had fragments of Turnton that we've exhibited in different places and we use different bits. But as you get past that superficial area, you start seeing things like toxic water. You see cargo drones, like flying cargo deliveries. An ocean recovery farm is like there. What is an ocean recovery farm? What is the Radical Recycling National Headquarters? So even though there's a whole bunch of things that are familiar, once you start looking closely, you get a whole bunch of things that are familiar, once you start looking closely, you get a whole bunch of questions thrown up. And then through that process of having these questions thrown up, it's like, OK, what happens next? And in this context, we then like to go into... I've got to make sure that I do the right click here so we get the right pictures. The bar, because you sort of move from this introductory space where everything's sort of like presented to you and you go into a more detailed space which is the bar. Come on, come on, the bar. That's a sleeping pod, that was a lot of fun to build if you had people like having to stay in spaces overnight, a travel motel. Yeah, it looks more graffiti. So the bar that is where you sort of get into more detail. So firstly, we've got things like the newspaper, the Trenton Gazette. Up the back there, there's a copy of the newspaper, so that's in German and in English, and it's a newspaper from the year 2047. It was established in 1948. You can, like, find things like these fish on the wall. It's an ex-fish restaurant there's a last served message on there so obviously they're not serving fish anymore are they because they're extinct what's going on there you've got these Hirschbühler like radio plays that you can listen to as if you're sort of snooping on that conversation at the table next to you in a bar and of course none of us would do that because we respect other people's privacy but other people that we know really like listening to other people's conversations and by doing this we could go past the introduction to building the world and its elements to the actual character interactions what sort of things are going on in this world one level there's a lot of complicated things that are going on about the way the world works but the other thing that's going on is a lot of everyday life. There's a lot of people falling in and out of love. There's people who are getting to know their new boss at a research organisation or they're having an argument with their boss because there's not enough resources to actually fix the broken things. These sort of everyday life aspects are really important in what we're doing. And one of the things that we've found is people will, like these two ladies here, often sit there and laugh a lot about the ridiculous stories that have been told. When we built Turnton... Where am I up to in my vague plan here? We could try and tell you about how we built Turnton or the entire story around Turnton. It would be a rather long process, so we're not going to do that today. If anyone wants to, they can ask me later. And if you've got an arbitrarily long amount of time, we can tell you an arbitrarily large amount of ideas that went into Turnton. But there's this idea that if we go into the future, a lot of things are going to be changing. We've got a lot of doom and gloom that's going on. So the storyline around Turnton that we mentioned was we don't manage to get our shit together and stop the ecosystem collapse that's looming. So if that all happens, if the oceans go toxic, if the jellyfish become the only thing that are floating around in there, we've got algal blooms that are making coastal areas totally dead, runoffs from farming and all the rest of it that are making rivers quite dead, runoffs from farming and all the rest of it, making rivers quite dead, all that sort of goes wrong because we're not actually reacting fast enough to slow things. If we then turned around and had a whole bunch of almost utopic socio-political changes to react to that, it's like, oh shit, we actually got that wrong. What could that sort of world look like? So in those sort of ideas of these slightly utopic elements, they're all things that already exist. When we started building Turnton, we didn't create any ideas. We didn't get all creative. We just looked around at things that were already existing and imagined taking them into a future. If they developed, if they actually got their own momentum, what would happen to combinatorial combinations? It's not a blueprint. Turnton's full of broken aspects as well. There's things that don't really work there. It's just a collection of propositions. And it's sort of this idea if we had a utopic element and dystopic elements and we merged them together and let them dance with each other, what sort of world might actually come out and how would the everyday life in that world feel? Because everyday life is really important. We're very happy to be able to snap a Daniella Meadows quote to sort of help us with that idea, that there is too much bad news to justify complacency, but there is also too much good news on all sorts of different levels to justify despair. So this is something that we like to take with us. Now, when we... I'm going to do a bit of a quick jump now, jump out. When we're talking about something called Tertan, we sort of created it based on the work that we were doing, but then discovered that there's something called an experiential future, which is a bunch of people were doing things like this, and then Stuart Candy, his colleague Jake Dunnigan, and a bunch of other people have started trying to work out what this actually means. And what this is trying to do is take this abstract idea of a future scenario and make it actually physically present and so you can actually use your somatic intelligence to be able to think about it being in the world. And so when we created Turnton, we started off with a whole bunch of notes and ideas, scenarios, all this high-level stuff, and then as we started to create an exhibition out of it, we had to make it into a story, into a narrative. We had to create characters, we had to create organisations, what do these people do, what tools do they need to do what they do, what do they do when they're at home, what do they do when they're running around doing something completely different, how they sort of react to things. And then how do these people come together, what are the situations that they actually find themselves in, and then what do they need in those situations to be able to communicate what it is that they're doing in those situations so when we build an exhibition that's like a little situation and so this was sort of this process of diving down and we then found that there's our mannequin did lots of model building as well this sort of process of diving down of course course, is not linear. When we create a situation, we then have to create more ideas about the scenario that we've created. When we go down to the actual building the stuff, that has to have a whole bunch of extra detail put into it as well and changes the situation. So there's a lot of feedback going on as we go down this experiential futures ladder. This is from Stuart Canby and it's been extended by this section in the middle, this idea of a story world, fictionalisation, creating actual narratives and dense narratives for people to be able to explore. And this is something that's sort of a nice collection of trying to understand what's actually going on in one of these exhibitions. And it gives us an idea of how we can go about trying to build one of these things, which we do in workshops and things um but also want to say here um yeah when you as a visitor come to turnton you start off at the bottom because all you find is the stuff and you start trying to work your way back up and of course you'll find different um interpretations of what you think's going on and that's's part of the beauty, is we can then have a conversation about the things that we didn't explicitly define in the stuff because that is the realm of possibility. And then we start talking about possible futures. We've had the pleasure over the past couple of years of working with 150 people, over 150 by now, to develop Turnton and the world around it. And every single one of those people brings something new into the Turnton world. world around it. And every single one of those people brings something new into the Turnton world. We would actually go so far as to claim that when Birkenau people come together, they expand the world and make it more well-rounded in a really good and useful way. Yes, so we're working with lots of people. And how many of you have read much Tim's Downey Robinson, our favourite utopian science fiction author? He's always good, got lots of weird science, and he doesn't have the neoliberal fundamentalists of some of our other science fiction authors. And in a recent interview, he popped this little quote out, which we quite enjoyed, because we think it really does explain not only the process that we have about the works that we do, but actually the work that we're doing in the world today, which is quite lovely. So, yeah, so we're bringing people together. We do a lot of thinking. We don't try and have utopias. We don't try and have dystopias. Utopias are homogenous. Utopias are sort of a little bit authoritarian or even vaguely fascist. So we don't have to have dystopias. Utopias are homogenous. Utopias are sort of a little bit authoritarian or even vaguely fascist. So we don't like that sort of thing. What we do, however, like is that, and I think this is the next slide, hopefully, by bringing a whole bunch of people to work on something like Turning Together, they actually have a whole bunch of different perspectives. And we really enjoyed David's idea about these many eyes making all bugs seem shallow and this is one of the things that we felt about Turnip. By having lots of people working on this together they were able to bring out a lot of the ideas and find sort of the logical and real life possibilities. One of the things about software, we know we can prove software works correctly. Has anyone got a real 100% hardcore I have to prove algorithms background to them in works correctly. Has anyone got a real 100% hardcore I-have-to-prove-algorithms background to them in the room? Has anyone actually proved an algorithm works? Come on, that's at least... Haven't you ever shown that something actually works? Does what it really does? It's a pain in the arse. Most of the time, we're interested in software doing the right sort of thing that we want. It has to have the right sort of look and feel, and that's exactly what we want when we're collaborating with people and creating visions of possible futures, is to have something that feels realistic and real and desirable. And desirable's a bit sort of difficult, because desirable's not always about the things that we really want, because sometimes we can't break away to what we think's possible. And so we've run across what Musil and Isaiah Berlin have talked about something called a wirkliche Ketzin, a sense of reality, those things that are actually real in the world and that feel real. Musil then goes to talk about something called a mögliche Ketzin. And in German, it's a little bit more eloquent than this translation here but that's just one of those things that you get. And someone who's got a very well-working merglicate sin will keep on saying this thing could have happened. It won't be just restricted to what has happened but to try and get beyond that. The problem with a merglicate sin, if you know somebody, and I'm sure we do, who's got one of those really well-developed merglicate sins, it's really, really annoying because they just spend a lot of their time saying what else could happen. So a lot of us have learned for two reasons. One of them is to be socially adaptable, that a merglicate sin is sort of a bit annoying for other people. The other thing is that it gets beaten down by practicalities. Most of the time, just because they're possible doesn't mean they're actually really going to happen. We would much rather think about Möglikatzin to a much larger degree because scenarios aren't just possible or impossible unless they're actually physically impossible, but different scenarios, when we're talking about possible futures, are more possible, more preposterous. There's a scale of things there. They're a preferred future or maybe a pernicious future, a future that's a bit nasty and evil. And these are the sorts of things that we'd like to be able to talk about. The other thing that happens when we're talking about possible futures, and I'm going to be coming to an end soon because it's coming up for my time. I've got another five minutes or so. Is to talk about this idea of coming together to talk about ideas, about developing these... These are Merklecate and these ideas. And there's an expression, actually, that we've stolen from Julia about social dreaming, which we probably misinterpreted in a nice way, but we're a great believers that when you're doing interdisciplinary work, your job is to misinterpret other people's ideas in ways that work for you. So hopefully you don't feel too misrepresented. But for us, social dreaming, on one side, it's very much about social, like coming together and discussing possibilities of the future together, which is very important. I really like, once again, the general intelligence agency's sort of discussion around discussing things. But also because dreams, like what we know from cognitive science dreams are what our conscious minds do to this whole bundle of images that our brains are sorting overnight is the current vague theory about what dreams are it's sort of like this process of rationalization and trying to make make sense of things and we like to think that when we're bringing a group of people together to do a facilitated workshop around possible futures, then they have a whole bunch of incoherent and mutually incompatible ideas about how the future could or should be. By doing a social dreaming process with them, we're encouraging them to work out a possible story around that sort of collection of ideas. And this is this social dreaming process. And it's really quite lovely to do with groups of people because they do come up with really interesting ideas. They're not necessarily useful. They're definitely in the merglicates area of things. A really nice experience that we've had was a woman who came along to several workshops that we did on Malta years ago and said that none of the workshops were actually useful to her in terms of the results that came out, but every time she left, she went away with such a better idea of the things that she could do in her actual work, which was a lot about organic supply chains and things, that it was worth her time to come and spend time with us. And we actually found that to be a really nice reflection on the process of just exercising your imagination. We don't talk about scenario building as the thing, but we're talking about futuring exercises, because like all sorts of fitness, futuring literacy needs to be maintained. So just to wrap up, thinking out loud about possible futures is actually creating new visions. It's about thinking out loud. And it's not about new stories, about preferred futures, not just more of the same and not just one dystopia or another. And so this little quote that popped up from somewhere in the 50s or 60s was quite nice and is a nice little reflection on our understanding of what neoliberal capitalism wants to sell us, which is just more. Thank you very much. If you need to find us, which is just more. Thank you very much. If you need to find us, that's where we can find us. APPLAUSE Thank you.