This week saw me in Austin for a panel at SxSW Interactive, with Harvard Fellow Jo Guldi and host Igor Schwarzmann of Cognitive Cities.
Our topic was the relationship between the science-fictional imaginary and the Cities! Of! Tomorrow! we may or may not come to experience; Igor spoke of having lived in both rigidly planned and very much unplanned cities, and showed a wonderful Soviet animated film illustrating the pitfalls of the former, and Jo gave a magisterial overview of domed-city rhetoric in fact and fiction. For my own part, I spieled about the things contemporary filmic science fiction gets wrong — primarily the way people react to conditions of density and anarchy — and its distressing propensity to cast the extant circumstances of the lives of others as the trappings of future apocalypse.
We had a good time, anyway, and judging from the Twitter stream it seems folks in the audience enjoyed it as well. But SxSW itself…well, let’s be clear: it struck me as having gotten so massively, sprawlingly large that it’s no longer actually much fun.
In years past, one of the simple pleasures of attending SxSW was simply wandering the Convention Center’s hallways, in the process of which you’d invariably run into dozens of people you either knew or wanted to know — the latter, primarily because you’d heard of from their awesome, idiosyncratic, lovingly hand-crafted Web sites. This time around, for all that those hallways were choked with people coming and going, I only once saw someone I wanted to chat with. (Hi, Jessamyn!) The multitudinous rest were utter and complete strangers, some significant cohort of whom seemed like they were mostly there to sell something.
Having obviously sussed that SxSW represents a prime nexus of early adopters, “influencers” and key communicators, marketing has descended on the event in the biggest possible way. Every other interaction seemed branded. The efforts ran the usual gamut from clueless/pointless to tone-deaf and offensive, the prize in this last category clearly going to whichever moron inveigled the team of systematically-underdressed young women into their “I’d Tap That” t-shirts. (I mean, do people really, honestly think that kind of thing shifts product? Why not just build something amazing and let it market itself?)
I did hear the intriguing alternate proposition put forth that SxSW’s problems stem from the fact that it’s not nearly large enough — that it basically has to ascend to the scale of an Edinburgh Festival Fringe or similar before coming into some new equilibrium. Not having been to Edinburgh since I was six, I can’t speak to the specifics of this notion, but it’s worth thinking about. If nothing else, I did have a moment strolling through pedestrianized Sixth Street with Eric Rodenbeck that what with the pedicabs, the lasers inscribing hashtags across the façades of buildings across the way, and the general air of genially drunken revelry, felt a little like a glimpse of Jubilee time in some practically achievable City Of Tomorrow. (“Genial”? Yeah. It was still relatively early in the evening.)
This was also my first chance to visit my old Citroën Lemmy, in his new home at the Hotel Saint Cecilia; thanks to Liz and Isadora and their crew at Bunkhouse, he’s looking rather well-loved. Makes me happy.
But the dominant emotional note of the event, and the thing that ultimately made it difficult if not impossible for me to sink into party mode, was the reality shear between Austin and the real-time horror unfolding in Japan. We have so many friends and loved ones on the ground there, and I simply couldn’t get them off my mind for long — I’d be at some tequila-fueled blowout, and checking my iPhone for updates on the Fukushima reactor situation. It might have made me (more of) a buzzkill (than I ordinarily am), but I felt stupid and grotesque and irresponsible celebrating at a moment when so many had lost so much.
Practically speaking, there’s not much of anything we can do to help, except the usual round of donations to NGOs. But to everyone in Japan, and for whatever pittance it’s worth: know that you’re in our thoughts and hearts at this terrible moment.
- Meanwhile, back home, Mayo’s been busily working on City Tickets NYC for MoMA, with the thought that it’ll be infinitely more interesting for us to build a new installation around the affordances and capabilities of New York’s native street furniture than simply showing Copenhagen’s v1.0.
He’s also been fabricating props for the PERRY video that he and Nurri are working on, in an effort to bring some concrete definition to our vision of RFID-based interaction. These may well only be visible on the screen for a moment, and in the peripheral blur at that, but will go a surprisingly long way toward selling the vision of a coherent future.
This is something I learned from Syd Mead and Ridley Scott at the age of fourteen, when I read that the magazines barely visible on the newsstand in Blade Runner all had fully worked-out covers, with some effort having gone into the naming of articles, authors and sponsors that would never breach the threshold of perception in the final product. The difficult bit is in designing artifacts that actually look like they were developed by the MTA or its vendors, and not smitten-with-elegant-minimalism interaction designers — but believe me when I say I’m stoked to finally put this insight to work in a project of my own, after a lapse of almost three decades.
- Coming up this Saturday, I’ll be at Left Forum, for a panel on “Intelligent Cities: The Good, The Bad and the Ridiculous” with Saskia Sassen, Ayesha Khanna and Greg Lindsay. It’d be great to see you there.
- Finally, and most importantly of all, this is the inaugural week of what will henceforth be known as FRIDAYS AT 7. Come wind up your week with us over cocktails at Temple Bar on Lafayette Street. Share a war story, sip a cryo-cooled and impeccably dry Martini, unwind in the company of friends and peers. You know where and when to find us.
- This upcoming week, both MN and AG are scheduled to be in the studio, working on the above-mentioned projects unless filming/etc. takes us to the field. Ping if you need anything.
