In June 2019 Martin Zeilinger and Furtherfield held a Future of Money workshop, inviting people with expertise in alternative currencies, crypto tech and to meet with sci-fi writers and enthusiasts. They presented their work and to stimulate a discussion on how the politics and practicalities of cashlessness could be explored with younger generations.
Contributors included:
Mud Howard – gender non-comforming sci-fi writer; Arjun Harrison-Mann – graphic designer; Ben Cain – graphic designer; Brett Scott – on the future of money; Jaya Klara Brekke – on the politics of crypto finance; Ailie Rutherford – feminist economics artist; Peter Holsgrove – art and blockchain developer; Cecila Wee – writer and curator with finance and money specialism. The aim of this event was to develop a framework for running workshops exploring the issues of a cashless society.
The framework, devised by Zeilinger, Furtherfield and Studio Hyte, is a playful workbook (and set of stickers and badges). Users select a scenario from Planet Cashless 2029 and are invited through a set of steps designed to tease out solutions to the scenario. For example in one scenario a cyborg melon seller loses power in their digital payment arm and they need to find an alternative way to sell their melons!
We now plan to further bring the workbook alive with AR. In particular, we aim to create futuristic scavenger hunts where young people can explore locally, investigate financial forms for themselves, and come up with their own solutions to arising issues of the disappearance of cash.
The first Future of Money Lab was run by Zeilinger and Catlow at Furtherfield Commons, London, on 6th June 2019
Martin Zeilinger is a new media researcher, curator, and practitioner whose work focuses on the intersections between new media art, emerging technologies, critical theory, and activism in the financial, political, and environmental realms. Martin is Senior Lecturer in Computational Arts & Technology at Abertay University in Dundee. He has curated the Toronto-based Vector New Media Arts Festival since 2013, and is a member of the curatorial collective for the Dundee-based NEoN Festival.
Featured image: Image from Planet Cashless 2029 booklet designed by Studio Hyte
Future Fictions for Finsbury Park is part of our Citizen Sci-Fi initiative. It brings together sci-fi writers in residence with local residents and set of scientific experts to explore written visions of a Finsbury Park of the future.
For our 2019/2020 year of FF4FP we worked with sci-fi writers Mud Howard and Stephen Oram to create two new short stories about the park, based on deep research conducted with community members and experts. Via a set of workshops organised by Producer, Ruth Fenton, participants were invited to explore both near and far future ideas based on the current knowledge we have of climate change and technological developments, to imagine how we might like to see Finsbury Park evolve.
At our Future Fair on 10th August 2019, both Mud and Stephen gave live readings of their stories, which will be published on the Furtherfield website this Autumn.
Mud Howard (they/them)
A gender non-conforming poet, performer and activist from the states. mud creates work that explores the intimacy and isolation between queer and trans bodies. mud is a Pushcart Prize nominee. they are currently working on their first full-length novel: a queer and trans memoir full of lies and magic. they were the first annual youth writing fellow for Transfaith in the summer of 2017. their poem “clearing” was selected by Eduardo C. Corral for Sundress Publication’s the Best of the Net 2017. mud is a graduate of the low-res MFA Poetry Program at the IPRC in Portland, OR and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Westminster. you can find their work in THEM, The Lifted Brow, Foglifter, and Cleaver Magazine. they spend a lot of time scheming both how to survive and not perpetuate toxic masculinity. they love to lip sync, show up to the dance party early and paint their mustache turquoise and gold.
Stephen Oram
Who writes thought provoking stories that mix science fiction with social comment, mainly in a recognisable near-future. He is one of the writers for SciFutures and, as 2016 Author in Residence at Virtual Futures – described by the Guardian as “the Glastonbury of cyberculture” – he was one of the masterminds behind the new Near-Future Fiction series and continues to be a lead curator. Oram is a member of the Clockhouse London Writers and a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors. He has two published novels: Fluence and Quantum Confessions, and a collection of sci-fi shorts, Eating Robots and Other Stories. As the Author in Residence for Virtual Futures Salons he wrote stories on the new and exciting worlds of neurostimulation, bionic prosthetics and bio-art. These Salons bring together artists, philosophers, cultural theorists, technologists and fiction writers to consider the future of humanity and technology. Recently, his focus has been on collaborating with experts to understand the work that’s going on in neuroscience, artificial intelligence and deep machine learning. From this Oram writes short pieces of near-future science fiction as thought experiments and use them as a starting point for discussion between himself, scientists and the public. Oram is always interested in creating and contributing to debate about potential futures.
The Future Experts comprised of local residents of Finsbury Park, who brought invaluable knowledge of the area, and professional experts from a variety of scientific and design based backgrounds, who brought expertise in future thinking in many areas including health, transport, technology and architecture.
Ling Tan
Ling Tan is a designer, maker and coder interested in how people interact with the built environment and wearable technology. Trained as an architect, she enjoys building physical machines and prototypes ranging from urban scale to wearable scale to explore different modes of interaction between people and their surrounding spaces. Her work falls somewhere within the genre of the built environment, wearable technology, Internet of Things(IoT) and citizen participation. It involves working with various communities in different cities and uses wearable technology as tools to express their relationship with the city, touching on demographic, race, gender and the subjective experience of the city through people.
Paul Dobraszczyk
I am a researcher and writer based in Manchester, UK, and a teaching fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. I’m currently researching anarchism and architecture as well as completing a co-edited book Manchester: Something Rich and Strange (Manchester University Press, forthcoming in 2020). I’m the author of Future Cities: Architecture and the imagination (Reaktion, 2019); The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay (IB Tauris, 2017); London’s Sewers (Shire, 2014); Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain (Ashgate, 2014); and Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers (Spire, 2009). I also co-edited Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within (Reaktion, 2016); and Function & Fantasy: Iron Architecture in Long Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2016). I am also a visual artist and photographer and built the website http://www.stonesofmanchester.com. I blog at https://ragpickinghistory.co.uk/.
Dr Rasmus Birk
I am a social scientist, currently working as a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine, King’s College London. My research here explores the relationship between city life and mental health, specifically how living in the city leads, for some people, to the development of mental health problems. I am currently researching the experiences of young people with common mental health problems (such as depression, anxiety, or stress) in South East London.
Dr Kate Pangbourne
University Academic Fellow at the Institute for Transport Studies (University of Leeds). She has an MA (Hons) in Philosophy with English Literature, an MSc in Sustainable Rural Development and a PhD in Geography – Environmental (Transport Governance). Her research is oriented towards shifting our transport system and individual choices towards greater environmental sustainability, social inclusion and meaningful prosperity. She is particularly interested in the implications of rapid technological change in the transport sector. Current work includes improving the persuasiveness of travel behaviour messages (ADAPT, funded by EPSRC), enhancing the rail passenger experience (SMaRTE, funded by the EU through Shift2Rail) and the societal challenges posed by self-driving vehicles and new concepts such as Mobility as a Service. Proof of humanity: has children, grows vegetables, sews and knits, sings, plays the piano, and used to play jazz sax (badly). Weird info: is a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Cordwainers and of the City of London (but lives in Scotland).
https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/transport/staff/971/dr-kate-pangbourne
Dr Christine Aicardi
Originally trained in applied mathematics, computer sciences and project management, with a MEng from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in France. She worked for many years in the Information and Communication Technologies industry, where she held a variety of positions (analyst/programmer, junior consultant, sales engineer, major account manager). She returned to higher education and came to Science and Technology Studies in 2003 as a mature student. After her MSc at the London Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology, she was funded by the ESRC through her doctoral studies, and in 2010, she completed her PhD in Science and Technology Studies at UCL, in the area of Artificial Life. She is currently a Senior Research Fellow for the Human Brain Project Foresight Laboratory. The Lab aims to evaluate the potential social and ethical implications of the knowledge and technologies produced by the Human Brain Project for European citizens, society, industry, and economy. Prior to this, she was Wellcome Library Research Fellow, working on a sociological history project focused on the later career of Francis Crick, British molecular biologist and geneticist, who in the 1970s moved to Southern California and became a neuroscientist.
Featured image: Rusty Russ Twisted Tree ReTwisted via photopin (license)
In thinking about the relationship between science fiction and social justice, a useful starting-point is the novel that many regard as the Ur-source for the genre: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). When Shelley’s anti-hero finally encounters his creation, the Creature admonishes Frankenstein for his abdication of responsibility:
I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. … I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, who thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. … I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.
Popularly misunderstood as a cautionary warning against playing God (a notion that Shelley only introduced in the preface to the 1831 edition), Frankenstein’s meaning is really captured in this passage. Shelley, influenced by the radical ideas of her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, makes it clear that the Creature was born good and that his evil was the product only of his mistreatment. Echoing the social contract of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Creature insists that he will do good again if Frankenstein, for his part, does the same. Social justice for the unfortunate, the misshapen and the abused is what underlies the radicalism of Shelley’s novel. Frankenstein’s experiments give birth not only to a new species but also to a new concept of social responsibility, in which those with power are behoved to acknowledge, respect and support those without; a relationship that Frankenstein literally runs away from.
The theme of social justice, then, is there at the birth also of the sf genre. It looks backwards to the utopian tradition from Plato and Thomas More to the progressive movements that characterised Shelley’s Romantic age. And it looks forwards to how science fiction – as we would recognise it today – has imagined future and non-terrestial societies with all manner of different social, political and sexual arrangements.
Shelley’s motif of creator and created is one way of examining how modern sf has dramatized competing notions of social justice. Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) and, even more so, The Caves of Steel (1954) ask not only the question, ‘can a robot pass for human?’, but also more importantly, ‘what happens to humanity when robots supersede them?’. Within current anxieties surrounding AI, Asimov’s stories are experiencing a revival of interest. One possible solution to the latter question is the policing of the boundaries between human and machine. This grey area is explored through use of the Voigt-Kampff Test, which measures the subject’s empathetic understanding, in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and memorably dramatized in Ridley Scott’s film version, Blade Runner (1982). In William Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer (1984), and the Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell (1995), branches of both the military and the police are marshalled to prevent AIs gaining the equivalent of human consciousness.
Running parallel with Asimov’s robot stories, Cordwainer Smith published the tales that comprised ‘the Instrumentality of Mankind’, collected posthumously as The Rediscovery of Man (1993). A key element involves the Underpeople, genetically modified animals who serve the needs of their seemingly godlike masters, and whose journey towards emancipation is conveyed through the stories. It is surely no coincidence that both Asimov and Smith were writing against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, but it is also indicative of the magazine culture of the period that both had to write allegorically. In N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015-7), an unprecedented winner of three successive Hugo Awards, the racial subtext to the struggle between ‘normals’ and post-humans is made explicit.
Jemisin, like Ann Leckie’s multiple award-winning Ancillary Justice (2013), is indebted to the black and female authors who came before her. In particular, the influence of Octavia Butler, as indicated by the anthology of new writing, Octavia’s Brood (2015), has grown immeasurably since her premature death in 2006. Butler’s abiding preoccupation was with the compromises that the powerless would have to make with the powerful simply in order to survive. Her final sf novels, Parable of the Talents (1993) and Parable of the Sower (1998), tentatively posit a more utopian vision. This hard-won prospect owes something to both Joanna Russ’s no-nonsense ideal of Whileaway in The Female Man (1975) as well as the ‘ambiguous utopia’ of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974). Leckie, in particular, has acknowledged her debt to Le Guin, but whilst most attention has been paid to the representation of non-binary sexualities in both the Ancillary novels and Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), what binds both authors is their anarchic sense of individualism and communitarianism.
Whilst sf has, like many of its recent award-winning recipients, diversified over the decades, there is little sense of it having abandoned the Creature’s plaintive plea in Frankenstein: ‘I am malicious because I am miserable.’ It is the imaginative reiteration of this plea that makes sf into a viable form for speculating upon the future bases of citizenship and social justice.
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