Contributor Sarah Holbrook

The masked and the un-masked joined forces in Austin after a two-year South by Southwest drought. The sidewalk terror normally caused by the Lime scooter brigades was diminished by smaller crowds overall, yet, the conference was surprisingly robust. Among the 15 tracks strewn across dozens of stages, Futures 2050 held sway.

 

Topics scattered among the Futures 2050 track can be divided first into megatrends. Web 3.0, De-Fi, and DAOs create one, the metaverse and tokenization, another, and QX (quantum experience) is a third. Other individual sessions drilled down on related and random topics including brain-computer interfaces, synthetic biology, Jedi-tech, psychedelic tourism, the future of sex, the future of nuclear waste, floating cities, sustainable blockchain, lab-grown diamonds, lab-grown food, a session called Spying on 2050, and more. SXSW 2022 was entirely overwhelming as per usual. If I’d had my way, a campaign of Houston Foresight’s curious would have joined me to fully exploit the content glut; I believe I was our sole representative.

 

To funnel the expansive experience into a blog post, I will avoid the megatrends and focus on a buzzy Houston Foresight theme for spring 2022, Speculative Futures which was presented in both sessions and activations across the 2050 and Design tracks.

 

  • ScanLabs UK presented FRAMEWORK, an immersive, three-dimensional, multi-screen, audiovisual expression of the imperceptible patterns of human activity, ecological degradation, and the implied intersection of the two. The story is told through a collection of 3D Lidar scans collected over two years in the U.K. The images blink through pastoral, shoreline, and urban scenes as cliffs retreat, gardens grow then wilt, cows are milked, and traffic loops endlessly. It was a mind-bending temporal journey through the recent past designed to encourage the viewer to speculate on the future.

 

  • Artist Collective MeowWolf, known for creating the speculative grocery store exhibition in Las Vegas, Omega Mart, “Selling everything from Alpha to Omega”, staged an extensive speculative activation that had viewers queueing for hours. The exhibition, titled “The Stream” was a series of built environments presented as individual islands created primarily from refuse. The stream snaked between the islands, each populated with artifacts, easter eggs, peepholes, and hidden QR codes that linked to the narrative of each isle. The clandestine code in the creation entitled Strikes and Gutters opened a song. The chorus lyrics read, ” Shrimp dreams shot into the cosmos. A thousand fingers on the bowling ball. Wobbling forward one and all to comic wonder or failure. Seeds in space still want to grow. Strikes and Gutters are all they know. A thousand fingers let go and hope to score. Strikes and gutters forever more”.

 

  • A talk by the founders of San Francisco’s Nonfiction Design, Mardis and Phnam Bagley titled “The Future of Everything”, covered both speculative projects and objects from the future that have been engineered, built, with some currently available for purchase in the present. The firm is staffed by a team of architects, engineers, designers, and storytellers who operate with the mission of making science fiction real by designing and engineering buildable futures, hence the name Nonfiction. Projects highlighted include a Future of Transit project for Nashville, a brain stimulator to encourage deep sleep for Halo Neuroscience (for sale now), the Human Headphones designed for Human Inc. (also for sale), The Future of Space Architecture and Interior Design for The Moon Village Association (absolutely not for sale), and others.

 

  • Two geodesic blow-up domes landed in a parking lot adjacent to the Austin Convention Center. The impresarios behind Non-Fungible Labs, a New Zealand-based collective of NFT enterprises created Fluf World, an event zone where one dome held a lecture space holding The Metaverse Manifesto and other Web 3.0 discussions which were debated, or not. This was a very Web 3.0 scene. The other held the blow-up-dome version of an Imax display with Fluf World’s Angelbaby Experience. A 3D concert projection that surrounded the viewers, displaying on the dome’s interior featuring “The world’s first meta-star, a metaverse native and universally influential virtual artist Angelbaby”, and their co-stars of NFT bunnies. The virtual stars were accompanied by famed music producer/DJ Mike Shinoda, and the musicians Gino the Ghost, BHS, and Celine Joshua. There was a bar outside the performance dome to fulfill the non-speculative SXSW tradition of standing in a crowded dusty lot drinking while listening to music.

 

  • Inside the convention center, ideas of utopia and dystopia were examined in a session led by professors and Co-heads of the U.S.C. Civic Imagination Project Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova. The team discussed speculative fiction as a vehicle for examining alternative futures to encourage civic engagement. They detailed developing creative imaginaries including a story created from the perspective of a discarded plastic shopping bag, documenting its journey as it was blown across the planet, and a postcard initiative that encouraged dropping a note, apologizing to a plant that you may have hurt or neglected.

 

  • A hotel ballroom was converted into an NFT gallery creating an oasis where speculative futures and the metaverse converged. The NFT art on display ranged from a video demonstration of an artist using a shrimp cocktail on ice as the medium to generate objects and wearables, to Afrofuturist Cyberpunk. An escalator ride above the gallery housed the XR experience showcase, a juried selection of current XR and VR storytelling experiences. I learned about the future of a forest with Sir David Attenborough then shifted headsets to visit a 1918 battlefield from WWI in which the Choctaw code talkers played a decisive role by relaying critical battle messages in their native language.

 

The work displayed and discussed at SXSW dovetailed with the curriculum in the spring 2022 Speculative Futures coursework and the agenda for the 2022 Spring Gathering. The presence of Stuart Candy, Dunne and Raby, and the Dada movement were in the ether, along with a few other things floating through the air earlier this year in Austin.