2022-09-14

Last updated Aug 15, 2023

• thinking about foresight …
  • copy Omidyar reports lol
• thinking about AI art

There are 2 ways this could go…

• Speculative futures
  • Inspirations:
    • Ambient Tech Report by Superflux + Omidyar
      • Objectives:
        • In this project, Superflux will explore how to catalyse people’s imaginations and create tools that can assist in removing barriers that prevent individuals and communities from shaping and implementing ambient technologies.
        • Aims to identify and analyze ambient technology’s effect on our lives as the basis for the development of futures scenarios
        • it will seek to inspire action: action in the form of better legislation, policy, funding, and technological product development, to ensure that these next generations of ambient technology do not continue to play a role in surveillance capitalism.
      • Output:
        • This work will deliver rich, thick, experiential visions of futures that aim to provoke new thinking around the ways in which such technologies might influence our lives
      • Method:
        • Research
          • Ethnographic research
            • To learn about people’s hopes and fears regarding technologies, especially those who are often excluded from their development
            • Objectives:
              • Examine which emerging ambient technologies are influencing and impacting our lives, knowingly or unknowingly, and how
              • Explore the principles of ambient technologies embedded in our infrastructures, the benefits and dangers of such practices, and implications for underserved and under-represented communities.
              • Understand how such ambient technologies may affect individuals, communities, and society as a whole.
            • Methodologies:
              • In-depth interviews (6-8 semi-strucutred individual ones; FGDs)
              • Online conversations
              • Search analysis, secondary research
          • Foresight research
            • Superflux also conducted a foresight study with a specific focus on the impact of emerging ambient technologies on communities that have been alienated from mainstream societies. This was accompanied by expert interviews.
            • The study then was followed by a broader horizon scan activity, scouring through texts, podcasts, interviews, news, media and academic research, looking for weak signals, fringe ideas, and continually emergent trends, which were mapped across individual, collective, infrastructure, governance and planetary lenses.
        • Sensemaking
          • finding emergent themes
        • Creating Future Scenarios and Outcomes
    • PORTALS report by Guild of Future Architects & Omidyar
      • Method:
        • year-long participatory process; 1000+ people to participate in approximately 1000 hours of creative and strategic foresight sessions. These sessions brought together people from diverse walks of life to imagine alternative histories and aspirational futures in order to articulate shared visions for how we might reimagine systems.
    • The Signals: The qualities of flourishing digital spaces; Research by New Public
      • Objective:  identify the most critical, broadly supported categories for flourishing digital space
      • Methods:
        • Interviewed and received feedback from experts across a number of fields and global vantage points — political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, communications theorists, technologists, product managers, journalists, user groups, philanthropists, and advocates across the political spectrum.
        • Reviewed related literature and research
        • Conducted focus groups in Brazil, Germany, Malaysia, South Africa, and the United States to understand how citizens relate to our principles and the language we’re using.
      • perhaps I can study Filipino digital public spaces? idk
    • Sinofuturism by Lawrence Lek
  • About:
    • First, discover the hopes and fears Filipinos have regarding surrounding technologies….specifically information and communications technology (i.e. cloud computing, software, hardware, internet access, data, transactions, communications technology)
      • Ethnographic
      • Foresight
        • interview experts in these areas….academics/scholars, startup founders
    • Then, I’ll look for emergent themes from research insights….
    • Output: a website report containing the following….
      • Themes I’ve found
      • Create scenarios (possible to plausible?) and speculative artifacts based on these through writing + design
        • Stories help make these trends more comprehsible? to the audience…helps them notice these trends
        • could also be used as marketing….
        • I could present my project as a fake institute
• Filipino science fiction? speculative fiction archive
  • Inspirations:
    • What’s the state of Southeast Asian Sci-fi? by Kontinenalist
    • The Anarchist Library
    • Cyberfeminism Index
    • Other Internet essays
      • The Lore Zone
        • omg what if…. i could explore how we Filipinos make our own lore online…
      • Post-Authentic Sincerity by Libby Sun
  • About:
    • I want to create an archive of spec fic? sci-fi? works created by Filipinos (i.e. books, films, art, games) that anyone can make use of and contribute to
    • I also want to interview Filipino spec fic? sci-fi? authors, and feature these interviews in the website
    • I want to discover the common themes in these works and see how they’re reflected in Filipino culture, whether past or present. I will expand on these through a series of essays
  • Thoughts/Concerns:
    • I feel like this goes more into communication or creative writing lmao, not so much computer science or design…
    • Wondering if I can explore the tension between the media we consume/create and propaganda/ideology…
    • I don’t think I’ll go with this….I realized that I’m interested in sci-fi/speculative fic because I’m interested in Filipino storytelling…
• Filipino internet lore
  • Inspirations:
    • Other Internet’s The Lore Zone: Memes → Memories → Micro-Mythologies
    • Know Your Meme
    • Web Cultures Web Archive
      • The Web Cultures Web Archive includes sites documenting the creation and sharing of emergent cultural traditions on the web. The mission of the American Folklife Center is to document traditional cultural forms and practices, and the proliferation of smart phones, tablets, and wireless Internet connections has positioned networked communication as a space where people increasingly develop and share folklore. This collection, co-curated with scholars who study digital culture, captures a set of websites that document elements of the various digital vernaculars enabled through networked and computer-mediated communication.
      • The Folklore Of The Future? It’s Meme Culture]( https://www.fastcompany.com/90134928/the-folklore-of-the-future-its-meme-culture)
        • Memes are shaping culture, language, and politics. And the Library of Congress is archiving it all.
    • COLLECTIVE WISDOM: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms
      • Co-creation on-line and with emergent media
  • About
    • Researching + documenting Internet memes / viral phenonmena situated in the Philippines
      • E.G. ManilaEncounters, Rp612 fic, International State College of the Philippines
      • Jejemon?
      • Filipino celebrity worship
        • Local celebrities e.g. Aldub
        • International: Hallyu wave
        • ^ basketball can be seen in both
      • Do tiktok subcultures exist? idk
    • Output:
      • Database of these movements
        • Metadata:
          • year, type
          • about, origin, spread
          • examples
      • Editorial:
        • collation of interviews with people who’ve created or actively participated in these memes
        • essay series? giant report? analyzing the common themes in these lores, seeing how they reflect our culture, both past and present
          • this can also be a video essay series
    • Seeing myself as an Internet historian….
  • Thoughts/Concerns:
    • Wondering if I can explore the tension between the media we consume/create and propaganda/ideology…
    • Resource dump:
      • Design a Meme: Visual Representation, Creative Strategies and Memetic Culture
      • Visual Culture and the Virtual: The Internet and Religious Displays
      • Manila’s urbanism and Philippine visual cultures
        • How we order and imagine ourselves is revealed by the visible forms of our built environments. Cities are the ultimate material expression of human desire and design. They are also forces of energy and fields of tension that structure our everyday imaginings and activities.
        • Like most global mega-cities, Manila is dangerous to its own citizens – polluted, dense, violent, and poor, with inadequate and badly maintained infrastructure and public utilities, but it is also a fecund incubator of cultural ideas, projects and networks.
        • ^ how can we apply this digitally?
        • the sociology of art is more than a socio-aesthetics. It is also a chronicle of the experience, performance and movement of aesthetic objects lodged in and across institutions, traditions and collective consciousness.
      • The Internet’s Influence on the Production and Consumption of Culture: Creative Destruction and New Opportunities
      • POWER & PUBLIC SPACE 10: DANK LLOYD WRIGHT – MEME SPACE
        • Memes are increasingly permeating architectural discourse, with Instagram accounts like  Dank Lloyd Wright ‘holding models of power to account, especially when power manifests as aesthetics.’
        • The meme itself, in Dank Lloyd Wright’s hands, is a sophisticated visual tool, with its own codes, styles and languages that mirror the ever-shifting currents of internet culture. DLW’s critiques and the debates around them take place almost exclusively online, and in the comments section of their instagram account in particular, in an era where public life itself need not extend beyond the screen
        • Meme space, as the anonymous Instagram collective Dank Lloyd Wright explains, ‘has the potential to showcase what criticism could be when it is detached from the profit motives of advertising, self promotion, and clout chasing’. In this episode DLW discuss what ‘meme space’ means to them, and the kind of virtual public forums it fosters.
      • Messy on the inside: internet memes as mapping tools of everyday life
        • I propose a framework that conceptualizes Internet memes as mapping tools of everyday life.
        • I argue that memes map out the social, cultural, and political landscape in which meme makers live and operate, and further reveals the intricate ties between new media technology and the political, cultural, and spatial arenas.
      • Memes as digital crafts
        • A democratic source of collective creativity, memes define our digital culture through transformative practices.
        • What if memes are digital crafts that are shaping the popular culture and folklore of tomorrow?
      • Digital Folklore
      • Philippine Digital Cultures: Brokerage Dynamics on YouTube
      • Memes in Far-Right Digital Visual Culture
        • the digital visual cultures of these 25 far-right organisations share compositional and thematic elements
        • There is also a shared symbolic lexicon lending itself to distinct visual discourses (e.g. fascist and neo-Nazi symbols like the swastika, motifs drawn from Greco-Roman antiquity and Christianit)
      • Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World
      • Digital Folklore Reader
      • Your Meme is Internet Folklore
      • Techno-imaginations: Internet Lore in Asia
      • Can be related to New Public Signals research
    • Maybe I’m going too much into communication? lmao
    • How this involves my tracks
      • Computer Science
        • Cultural Studies of Technology class
        • Database Design class
      • Information Design
        • Visual Communication class
        • Philippine Design class
        • Interdisciplinary Approaches to Creativity & Innovation class
        • Information Architecture class (UX/UI)

OK ALMOST 3 AM THOUGHT DUMP…

• I want to explore Filipino culture online (i.e. digital folklore? Philippine digital visual culture)…How do Filipinos write the Internet?
• through a database of memes
• based on the collected data, a series of essays will be written on emergent themes
  • from concrete (e.g. shared symbols) to abstract (e.g. thematic elements)
• wondering if I can write about how these memes reflect the design of the platforms we use a.k.a. digital public spaces
• Research paper? and creative project? AGHHHH…don’t think it’s applied because I don’t have a target audience in mind?

To-do:

• Narrow down the science fiction realm
• Narrow down the type of project you want to do
• Make use of the Cards/BEAM Method

Filipino sci-fi:

• Alimuom
• Trese?
• RPG Metanoia
• Saving Sally

Example archives:

• https://daangdokyu.ph
• http://digilib.ust.edu.ph
• https://cdli.ucla.edu

Other recommended resources:

• Aesthetics
  • What’s the Use of Art?: Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context
• Afrofuturism
  • The Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Party in American Visual Culture
  • Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation
  • The Futurism movement
  • Works of bell hooks
  • Works of Frantz Fanon; check out Black Skin, White Masks
• Philippines + Southeast Asia culture
  • Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946-1980
  • The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World
  • Weaving Cultures: The Invention of Colonial Art and Culture in the Philippines, 1565-1850
  • Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle, and the World-Media System