{"id":1928,"date":"2017-05-06T14:04:13","date_gmt":"2017-05-06T14:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chrisspeed.net\/?p=1928"},"modified":"2017-05-06T15:16:40","modified_gmt":"2017-05-06T15:16:40","slug":"plastic-dinosaurs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chrisspeed.net\/?p=1928","title":{"rendered":"Plastic Dinosaurs"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Short 7 minute talk \/ intervention into the Talbot Rice Gallery \/ Exponential event on the 24th of April 2017 that was framed as:<\/p>\n

“Join an event that accelerates from 10 years to beyond 100 million in just 2 hours, moving from speculative talks to experimental poetic and musical performances. Taking the lead from the works in Between poles and tides, Exponential is an invitation for us to think about the future, the passages of time that we have experienced and those much, much further ahead.”<\/p>\n

Developed and led by James Clegg, the evening featured 9 performers who spanned the arts, geo-sciences, cultural theory, poetry and music to move through 10, 100, 10,000, 100 million and 1e + 16 years.<\/p>\n

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Below is a modified transcript of my short talk. I say modified, because the direct transcription from the audio recording doesn’t entirely make sense!<\/p>\n

Plastic Dinosaurs<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first thing I need you to do is to take a plastic dinosaur from the first tray, then take a plastic human from the second tray, and finally take a toe tag from the pile that is going to be past around the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/table>\n

When I was asked to talk about, or speculate on futures that are 100 years from now, I was very interested in how an idea could be made less abstract by encouraging you to hold on to something as we stepped into the future. The artefact is plastic dinosaur and it is provoked by a particular tweet that entered the world just over a year ago:<\/p>\n

\u201cThat awkward moment when you realize plastic dinosaurs are made of actual dinosaurs.\u201d 1st of February 2016, at 6:08AM (GMT) @BrianRathbone<\/a> <\/strong><\/p>\n

It was in the a deeptime \u2018rush\u2019 (not a ground rush that a parachutist might experience as they approach the last 200 ft of a fall) that I scrambled through the children\u2019s drawers in search of a plastic dinosaur to try to make sense of the time scales involved. For me, holding a plastic dinosaur, evokes a phenomenological awareness that everything around you, every manufactured thing, every element of information, has come into being through the expenditure of energy. An expenditure of energy that in many cases is 66 million years old, and is derived from animal and vegetable materials that have produced oil, coal and gas. <\/p>\n

As we explore the next 100 years, I\u2019d like you to hold on to your dinosaur, because we probably won\u2019t have lots of the material that makes this stuff left, so treat it with great care. Whilst, I\u2019m not sure about facts anymore, and we have geologists amongst us tonight to corroborate or dismiss, it\u2019s been mooted that this stuff in particular may well run out by 2088, so by the time we reach 2117 this may well be a very important asset for society, but perhaps it needs to take the form of something else. <\/p>\n

So when we think of things that do take different forms, transubstantiation, \u201cthe conversion of the substance of the Eucharistic elements into the body and blood of Christ at consecration, only the appearances of bread and wine still remaining\u201d maybe was something mythical, maybe it\u2019s a story, certainly something that was part of a past, but an idea that may well become part of the present in 2117. I suspect that in 100 years time, reminiscing, speculating and laughing about holding dead creatures and then reconstructing them, transubstantiating them into other forms, may well be considered conceit of play, a conceit of a Modern idea in which we can take things from the world and turn them into anything we want, and to be honest, they are \u00a39 for a bag of 72. I doubt if they will be that cheap in the future.<\/p>\n

As a designer looking around for references, I was interested in James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau\u2019s work. This is their After Life project<\/a> from 2009, and they speculate on our future death as energy. Their design speculation was envisaged through a coffin that would capture biological residue from a decaying body after it was placed into the ground. Underneath the coffin is a bio-chemical battery that captures energy, as though every persons life can be condensed into a small, short life battery. <\/p>\n

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