I’m really trying to write a blog post about Sascha Pohflepp, but it’s hard not to rant about the end of freedom on the Web2.0 wall.
I can’t show you the Al Gore video, because NBC/Universal made YouTube take it down.
Culture wants to be free. NBC/Universal doesn't get it.
I can’t show you Sascha Pohflepp’s Golden Institute video because WordPress.com won’t allow Vimeo videos to be embedded on the blogs they host.
Welcome to the Balkan States of Web2.0
Since I have all eternity, or at least until Flickr, Facebook, WordPress and Linden Lab block my accounts, to rant about the end of freedom in the hegemonic world of web2.0 where sovereign corporations do anything they feel like and their temporary users have neither rights nor recourse, neither Due process nor Habeas corpus, neither the right to face your accuser, nor to face your judge, I’ll just get on with the post for now…
</end of rant>
Photo of Sascha Pohflepp by Matt Biddulph. Click for his flickr page.
Hiiiiiii!
I want to talk about an exciting young artist, Sascha Pohflepp, who’s boyish good looks belie his incisive take on culture. Here’s a young man who has both beauty and brains!
Anyway, the Al Gore video you’re not watching – you’ve probably seen it – is a 2006 Saturday Night Live State of the Union address from President Gore… live from a parallel universe.
Sascha Pohflepp likes parallel universes too. He’s reconsidered the American election of 1980 where Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter’s bid for a second term. He notes that Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House… Reagan took them off… Carter was about alternative energy… Reagan was all about oil…
So Pohflepp considers an alternate history… one where Carter wins the election and pursues an aggressive energy research policy. Under Reagan the Department of Energy that Carter had created had it’s budget cut by 90%, but in a second Carter Administration, might The Golden Institute in Golden Colorado have achieved a Rand Corporation-like dominance in the economic and cultural landscape?
Pohflepp’s video I’m not allowed to show you is here:
It’s a wonderful video of Golden Institute senior strategist Douglas “Doug” Arnd describing some of the diverse, idiosyncratic projects developed at the institute.
In his "Counterfactual History," Pohflepp declares the state of Nevada a "Weather Experimentation Zone"
Pohflepp’s built many models and props of this reality:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/saschapohflepp/sets/72157613698533810/
But do watch the video even though I wasn’t able to embed it. It’s a sublime cultural masterpiece, deftly interweaving the ideology of an alternate cultural narrative with the aesthetics of our lived cultural narrative. A little bit like Cindy Sherman’s “film stills” that reference no specific cinema moment, yet feel so archetypically familiar, Pohfelpp’s video is about a world that never was, yet is couched with iconography and design aesthetics we remember so well from childhood that we strangely, unexpectedly, effortlessly find ourselves slipping into this alternate river of time.
The matrix of the now often seems to have an intense, inevitable quality to it. That this place we sit at was the destiny, the only possible outcome of all that came before now.
We are just hosts to reproducing genes… just hosts to reproducing memes… just hosts, and batteries, to developing technology. I often feel this way, in a sort of Zen “bigger picture than me” kind of way.
Pohflepp questions the validity of the convenient, self-perpetuating message from the high-priests of science that science is an inevitable cascade of events. A determinate, sequential revelation of absolute truth.
Of course, as anyone who’s ever assassinated a world leader to halt a peace process can tell you – it works! You can fight the future. And whether or not there are alternate parallel universes/realities, the river of time can, at least, be diverted a bit. We spend so much time telling ourselves so many stories about how and why we are here, now… it’s liberating, and unnerving, and funny to consider the worlds one might be living in.
It’s funny. In my own life there are so many little idiosyncratic, specific twists and turns and special timings and connections: the boyfriends who so nearly worked out, the career opportunities that could so easily have been missed, it seems like I could so easily be living one of a thousand different possible nows. And yet, when I zoom out from the myriad tiny cataracts that have spun my life in the crazy connect-the-dots that is my now, I do see the current of a larger river. It feels like a ridiculously romantic idea, and yet I do have an overarching suspicion that somehow, even if I had married that guy… even if I’d never been included in that career-altering, seminal show… that somehow in the larger sweep of time I’d pretty much be who and where I am anyway.
There are so many different stories one can tell in connecting the dots of the constellations of the night sky. But no matter what wildly different figures and myths about them your culture happens to tell when it gazes into the ocean of the heavens at night… regardless, there is a morning where the sun of an electric age rises and you have neither the time nor the night darkness to gaze into the heavens anymore.
And so I find both sides of this “possibilities” coin rather compelling. Both that tiny choices could easily change everything, and that the river inevitably deposits us at its delta one way or another.
Time travel books and films have engaged this question also. In some narratives simply picking up a feather in the park summons forth an alternate future. I get swine flu or something from the feather, die, and my great granddaughter who was to have changed everything is never born. In other narratives we wreak all sorts of havoc, and yet the river of time somehow flows over it all. The individual water molecules bouncing in very different places even as the flow of the river is undiverted.
And, of course, in some time-travel narratives you and I repeatedly travel back in time recursively killing each other’s grandmother in an infinite loop.
The one thing that time-travel narratives are so rarely about is the future. They are almost always reconsiderations of the past because, as I-forget-who once said, prognostication is hard… especially when it’s about the future.
Photo of Sascha Pohflepp by Andy Smith. Click for his flickr page.
Which, by the way, was one of the impulses that pushed Pohflepp along this path. He looked at 100 mid-twentieth-century predictions by the Rand Think Tank about things that would come to pass by the year 2000. He found that many actually had come to pass… many others were “well, somewhat”… and that many were not even close. He posited that if so many of these imaginings, if so many of these guesses about the future could be right… and so many wrong… might not the difference of a budget line item from Reagan to Carter cause one of the “true” predictions to fail and one of the “failed” predictions to come to pass?
I think Pohflepp’s work is engaging for almost any audience… but if you happen to be an avatar in a virtual world, it’s especially compelling.
Great “fiction” writing often contains more “truth” than “non-fiction,” and as we craft our identities and personas as avatars, perhaps we inevitably discover truths along the way. Philip Linden has often commented that he believes seeing a person’s avatar can tell you more about them than seeing them in the physical world. One of my students blogged, “My name is Jenny. I didn’t pick it out, my parents did.” And then she took us on a tour of her virtual world, wearing a name that she’d given herself.
If you’ve ever tried to tease out the “real” feelings you have in the “virtual” or “fake” world… ever wondered how cyborg you can be and still be a “real” human… ever questioned the gender/power discourse of why you can have gold in your teeth and bluetooth in your ear and still be “real” but that silicone under your breasts can make you “fake,” you will recognize that a seemingly simple word like “real” is remarkably complex and ripples through a vast cultural matrix. What it means to be real-fake-fake-real-fake, as opposed to fake-real-real-fake-fake-real-fake… well… it’s complicated…
Some peeps claim Wikipedia is inaccurate. I don’t agree, but how many peeps really care anyway? If you use Wikipedia to settle a drinking bet, do you want absolute truth? Or just a good story? David Weinberger thinks that truth, or “information” is like beer – that you don’t storm out of a bar because their beer isn’t “perfect,” instead you simply say “that’s pretty good beer,” sit down, and enjoy it.
I believe that the dominant product of the developed world is entertainment. In entertainment culture can anything trump a good story? I’ve watched tour groups pass thru ancient ruins and heard different tour guides tell completely opposite stories about the site — their audiences looked equally fascinated in both cases.
A PhD tour guide at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was once disappointed by the mediocre audience reviews she got in “thanks” for all the research prep she did for her tours. So she dropped in on the tour of a colleague who she knew never researched anything, but got fantastic audience reviews. The colleague marched the group over to a large, heavily red canvas on the wall, gestured heroically upward, and exclaimed, “Look at that red!”
I am fascinated by Pohflepp’s work, yet in the end, perhaps the banks of the river of time are immutable, because, as we all know, it is impossible to convincingly exclaim in a single breath, “Look at that International Klein Blue!”
