The Future Ain't What it Used to Be:Learning to Accept Mortality at the V&A.

"The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck" - Paul Virilio, 1999.

Herbert Bayer - The Lonely Metropolitan (1932)

It seems a luxury, an indulgence even, to think about the future in such uncertain times. Uncertain politically, uncertain financially, uncertain personally, and uncertain as regards the future of the planet even. There's an overwhelming desire, and one I felt quite keenly during my visit to the V&A's The Future Starts Here exhibition, to scream out loud. Until we can feed, house, clothe, and look after the people of the planet should we really be worrying about robots that can do the laundry, espresso machines that can be used in outer space, and 'smart curtains that track human emotions'?

Of course, there is more to some of these designs for the future than that and some may, either directly or indirectly, help with those urgent housing and feeding needs. Yet, The Future Starts Here was nearly as uncertain as the future itself. It was hard to get to grips with exactly what the curators were trying to say and I left, sadly, a little bit underwhelmed. If this is the future then I don't wanna live for ever, that's the way I like it, baby.

The exhibition is divided up into five, fairly tenuous, sections. Self, Public, Planet, Afterlife, and The Future Is... and each of those into smaller subsections, posing questions in turn vague or specific.

Vague questions include:-

What makes us human?

Does democracy still work?

Who wants to live forever?

and the more specifically worded are:-

If Mars is the answer, what is the question?

Is Edward Snowden a hero or a traitor?

Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks (BRETT) (2010-ongoing)

On the surface they sound like BIG questions but they're pretty tedious really. As are some, if not all, of the exhibits on show. The aforementioned robot that does the laundry, for example. Brett, for that's the robot's name, doesn't even do a better job than us humans at washing and drying. To be fair, 'he' has been included in the exhibition to show us just how far we have to go when it comes to mechanising certain fairly routine (to us) chores.

The way out of this conundrum would appear to be not just making robots more human but, at the same time, making us humans more robotic. We study our bodies now more than ever with clothes, jewellery, fitbits, and mobile phones that measure how many steps we take each day, how much we sleep, and even our oxygen intake.

While these help us monitor how much, or how little, physical exercise we get, isn't there also a danger that they increase our anxiety? We get stressed if we haven't done our 10,000 steps, slept a full seven hours, or eaten our 'five a day'. If we're worried about what we're putting into our bodies we can always have our food genetically modified. Salmon, like the one below, have been grown in Canada using GM to double their size. Is this a sustainable answer to decreasing stocks of wild fish, depleted by human demand, or should we just eat less fish and grow more veg? On top of that, people are uncertain about eating 'engineered' fish and so far it is illegal to export these megafish outside of Canada.

What of the software that's been developed, and used by employers like Amazon and Tesco, to keep tabs on their staff? Certainly, that should make anyone anxious, while at the same time eroding their sense of personal liberty. I worked for a company once that installed heat monitors beneath our desks to see how much time we spent away from them. They were sharp edged and ripped my knees to fuck but I was far more concerned with the dehumanising effect of them.

By the time I walked out on that job I felt I was a number, not a man. I felt I had as much value to the company as an office chair and if it was up to the management regime that had wrested control of my department I'd have been dismissed as quickly and unceremoniously as a broken chair, should they be able to outsource my work.

Fitbit - Fitbit Surge (2014)

Heather Dewey-Hagborg - Radical Love (2016)

Alexi Hobbs - Why Won't the Government Let You Eat Superfish (2014)

But it's not all doom and gloom. There's the Cheetah Xtreme carbon leg that Jonnie Peacock wore (a version of) to win the 100 metres during the Paralympics in both London and Rio de Janeiro, there's a cot that can rock your baby to sleep for you, there's tech designed to help with teaching in conflict zones, and there's a Ben Ten themed prosthetic hand that is worn by a six year old Yemeni boy who suffered serious injury during a house fire.

There's other stuff that we find useful, rather than vital. Most obviously, our smartphones. You only need to sit on a train and look around to realise that people are glued to them these days. That's both good and bad. It's not great if they're ignoring their kids, their friends, or the real world around them but, of course, if you have the entire internet in your hand it's hard not to keep looking at it.

There's a driverless lawnmower which would save time but take away for what some people is a very pleasurable experience, there's a camera which decides when to shoot for you - something I'd find very annoying, and then there's Alexa. The voice controlled assistant that is strangely popular with people who don't go on social media because they're worried their personal data is being mined. Work that one out!

Refugee Open Ware - Prosthetic hand (reproduction) (2017)

We have more connections to the world, to each other, than ever. But still we hear that there is an epidemic of loneliness. As our gadgets and tech learn to fulfill some of our needs are we letting other, more primal, needs and desires go unattended? If so, how might that pan out in the near future (assuming we have a planet left to live on) when machines become far more advanced? Will it be possible to live among the robots and have no human contact whatsoever? Would we even desire that? Would the robots let us? Might they feel lonely themselves if they have become so advanced they've developed emotions and are now being ignored? 

Don't ask me. I don't know. That's why I went to the damned exhibition in the first place. But, of course, the exhibition could not answer questions about the future. It could only ask them and speculate on possible, or even likely, developments. Can technology assist in finding solutions to the refugee crisis at a time when demagoguery is exacerbating it? Is the growing popularity of populist leaders we are seeing a threat to democracy itself and, if so, how will that affect the future of both tech and design? Will it be used to aid the populists and demagogues or will the resistance find smarter solutions?

Pussyhat Project - Pussy Power Hat (2017)

These are big, important, and currently unanswerable questions and while we can all celebrate small acts of defiance, witness the Pussy Power Hat as worn by many on last year's Women's Marches as a protest against Donald Trump's proud boasts of being able to use his power to get away with sexual assault, this exhibition fails when it comes to looking at the bigger picture.

It's important that things like that are here, and it does no harm that the exhibition touches on the dubious morality of Cambridge Analytica and bitcoin, the lack of affordable homes in the public sector, and even the vexed question of having an algorithm as a boss. Something Uber drivers are currently suffering with, due to the design of algorithms that, inevitably, perhaps even necessarily, are geared towards making the company very rich, rather than helping out either drivers of even customers.

Bitcoin Miner (2017)

The Collective - Old Oak (2015)

But for the most part, we get to see, maybe two exhibits or examples of each subject before we're swiftly ushered on to the next thing. As Ferris Bueller said "life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while you could miss it". The future we're looking at here doesn't seem to have much time for the Ferris Buellers among us, the dreamers, the idlers, the romantics. It often looks like a mean, conservative future in which the only value is a numerical one. Number of years lived, number of steps walked, number of hours worked, and ultimately number of pounds, or bitcoin, accumulated.  

It looks like a world in which we're ever more determined to find new sources of power and sustainability but only so we can drain them in much the same way as we have done the planet's other resources. A world in which we could colonise other planets (just to destroy them), invent new animals (just to drive them to extinction), and monetize each and every aspect of our lives, leaving us with piles of cold hard cash (or more likely no cash and loads of gadgets we don't really need or want) and nobody to spend it on or with.

That's the depressing part of the exhibition, or one of the depressing parts. There's also lot of curious, seemingly quite irrelevant, stuff on show too. Stuff that doesn't quite fit into the remit or if it does, does so under very tenuous circumstances. Oddly enough, that stuff turns out to be among the most interesting to look at.

From Herbert Bayer's 1932 artwork The Lonely Metropolitan (which heads up this blog and has presumably been included to show that alienation in modernity is a not a new thing) to a 13c silver reliquary in the shape of a hand, there's lots of things you can gawp at, be impressed by, and then try to work out what they're doing there.

Are passenger pigeons really making comeback? Is getting a good cup of coffee genuinely a priority for astronauts? And are Shell really the most trusted company when it comes to offering advice on the environment?

Reliquary (1250-1300)

Passenger Pigeon (About 1880-1900)

Lavazza and Argotec - ISSpresso (2015)

 

Tom Eckersley and Eric Lombers - Scientists Prefer Shell (1936)

Antanas Mockus - Super Citizen Suit (1995-2012)

Zones Urbaines Sensibles (ZUS) - Luchtsingel (2011-15)

While, undoubtedly, flags for Syrian refugees, suits that manage to somehow celebrate citizen power and reduce crime at the same time, and crowdfunded bridges that ease travel around Rotterdam are nice, I'm afraid to report that I left this exhibition feeling that there is more to fear in the future than there is to be positive about. One of the very last things I saw was a toolkit for cryopreservation so that, potentially, my family and friends (who'd presumably all be dead as well, anyway) could bring me back to life once the technology is in place.

I thought about how confused I am by modern life already and then considered the idea of returning to a world that has nobody in it I know or love and is full of technology utterly beyond my comprehension, one that has possibly been devastated by nuclear war or climate change, and I thought to myself "nah, you're alright". I'm not looking forward to dying but when I'm dead, I think I'll stay dead. Someone else can sort the fucking mess out.

Ray & Terry's Longevity Products (2017)

Cryonics Institue - Standby kit (2018)