Your monthly non-spammy-gif-heavy newsletter from your friends at oio.
Lunar villages and intelligent lakes
After a hot summer of work we are back with a fresh round of news, project updates and of course, more GIFs.
In August and September we had a pretty busy schedule, finishing our work for the Museum of the Future in Dubai, helping a lake write poetry for the Festivaletteratura, and preparing an exhibition about the history of the future with Telefonica Foundation. It's been a pretty intense future-driven summer.
🗞 Oio News
Upcoming public exhibitions
save the dates!
This month we will be travelling to Dubai and Madrid to finish two projects we have been working on for a while.
The Museum of the Future in Dubai has been a very long project, where we collaborated with Near Future Laboratory, Dan Goods and David Delgado from NASA JPL and Galerija 12 to create one of the biggest immersive fictions (we cannot say too much about it yet 👀 ), but it will be open to public from December.
Slight smaller scale, but also very juicy is our immersive installation for La gran Imaginacion in Madrid. An exhibition for Telefónica Foundation about the past, present and future of...futures. Curated by our good friend Jorge Camacho and with some work from Normals and the Institute for the Future. The exhibition will be open to the public from the 2nd of November.
Live speculations on lunar citizens at Venice Biennale
A few weeks ago we were invited to a live brainstorming about the future of lunar settlements for the Italian virtual pavilion of Venice Biennale. In a 2 hour session, facilitated by our friends from Very Very Far Away and the New School, our own Simone, together with Dr. Haym Benaroya (Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers University) and Stephanie Sherman (Director of MA Narrative Environments at Central Saint Martins) discussed what it would mean to become a lunar citizen. Covering topics all the way from the first step and welcome on the moon to the mundane details of jobs, artefacts and rituals of a future lunar 'village'.
You can watch the recording here.
If a lake could write, would we understand it?
This century-old question finally have an answer, and it's...maybe! At least we can read it. At the beginning of September we were in beautiful Mantova, where Matteo did a few talks about the role of AI in cultural production, as part of the launch of their latest book. All the talks took place in rather scenic locations - from a Renaissance square all the way to a freaking boat, on a lake, at sunset. Very moving! Some people cried, but not us! We had talks to talk and poems to write.
The occasion was Festivaletteratura, one of the main cultural events in the world, with an impressive speakers line-up including heavyweights such as Daniel Kahneman, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Slavoj Žižek and Formafantasma, all concentrated in this tiny jewel of a city.
We also installed a printer in the main square of the city, writing poems all day, one every minute. The poems were generated by an (artificial?) lake intelligence, trained on a dataset of 56 THOUSAND LINES OF POETRY. Gosh. Using values from environmental sensors collected by CNR (the largest research council in Italy), we were able to generate poems based on the lake's personal feelings. If the floating sensor was detecting low temperatures in the early hours, the lake would write a poem about cold in the morning. Pretty impressive! More info coming soon, we might turn this into a little product.
⚡️ Oio Thoughts
🕵️♀️ Future Impatience
It seemed like yesterday when we started working on the Museum of the Future but when I look at the calendar it's almost 3 years, a time when oio was still in its stealth state.
Coming up with ideas, concepts and prototypes of life in 2070 is an incredibly enjoyable process. We got in touch with inspiring people, got into crazy conversations, got to extrapolate stories, artefacts and daily lives of people in pretty far-out scenarios. However when the future needs to be built, even if built means a fictional output like a museum, it takes a lot of time, often more than expected. Objects need to be produced, painted, tested, walls need to be put up, shipments get lost and so on...
It's safe to say that reality hits hard.
William Gibson recently talked about future fatigue, or how we have now grown weary of the 'future'. And this made me think about how more than tired of it, we might also get plain bored or impatient about the future. Because the built future happens very very (very) slowly. So how is it that we get bored of things like EVA suits for pets or AI generated snacks so easily? And how is it that a future 70 years from now, that you thought about 2 years ago become old and stale so quickly?
Could an answer potentially lie in the sprint and quarterly based design and technology culture that seems to be pervasive in any area you look. We want moonshots and we want them yesterday!
If building a museum model of a space settlement takes a long time, it's probably safe to assume that sending hundreds of rockets to the moon to build settlements is gonna take a heck of a lot longer. Which raises again raises an interesting question and some self reflection. Does the future end up happening slower because we lose interest in it too quickly? Should we fix our work and thinking at a particular point in time and only shift the time horizon once that point is reached rather than continuously shifting the perspective forward in a search for new and more exciting futures?
I don't have the answer but as a parting note I think it's worth reflecting on the futurists of yesteryear with an Italian anecdote. The Duomo in Milan took almost six centuries to complete (1386-1965). I wonder if the architects and artisans were as future impatient as I am?
🌐 Oio Community Links
Our Discord community is growing, we are now almost 400 people. Discord is where we announce things before any other channel - workshops, drops and job ads. If you want to stay tuned with the hottest news from oio, make sure to smash this JOIN link.
Here some cherry-picked links for you:
🔥 Hot on Kickstarter - our friends at Ethafa just launched their kit
🤖 Synthetic faces are here! Microsoft generated 10,000 faces to train their latest algorithms
🎉 Dinner Party, a bonkers GPT3 generated weekly series
✏️ The Neural Yorker, a delightfully weird series of synthetic cartoons
📕 The Extreme Self, one of our new favourite books from our good friend Shumon Basar
💬 General Seminar, a platform for discussion of very edgy topics by Near Future Lab
🕵️ Follow oio
📡 Listen to oio.radio
✌️ Have a great rest of the week everyone!
