'states of convergence' outlines a vision for the future of sydney in 2050...

The film is a convergence of 4 assumptions, selected from a range of 60, and associatively forming a single, potential view into the future.

'states of convergence' was launched at the RAIA national architecture conference in Sydney.

Presenters Anthony Burke + Joanne Jakovich introduced the project with the following:

"We recognise the inevitable expansion of digital, human and environmental cognition, into a network that reaches beyond Waldner’s Internet of Things.
                 
Indeed, the matter comprising our buildings and cities of the future will be increasingly adaptive and autonomous. And it is certain, that the greatest challenge of ubiquitous everything will be a political one.

Based on the inherent structure of the system, governance will arise through commodification of demand, surpassing what we have seen with today’s Internet economy.

Within the so-called ‘systems architecture’ of this governance, the architects of 2050 will take on the task of subverting regimes of averages, efficiencies and popular demand.

They will be Vector Guerrillas.

Architects will modulate flows, hack frameworks, or systematically create disturbance in order to generate rebirth and novelty.

They will advocate symbiosis between nodes, or little-by-little implement protological transformations that reshape rules and, ultimately, matter.

…

As Alan Kay noted, we propose that "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

And, enacting our thesis, we have prepared this film in the opportunistic mode of an ad-hoc network.

Indeed, in 2050, we as today’s X-gen architects will be at the height of our career, and it is with great thanks to Richard and the RAIA that we have been able to engage the brilliance and creativity of the minds of the future.

We took this opportunity to look into current research across a broad number of fields outside of architecture that we think will impact architecture and the environment.

In our scenario-building, we looked at energy harvesting technologies, intelligence research, Convergence Culture, Collective Intelligence, and discussions on information technology beyond web 2.0. as well as tourism, economics, bio and energy politics, and so on.

We looked at Trend analysis including Ian Pearson’s British Telecom white papers on the future, and Silicon Valley’s Paul Saffo who along with James Canton (CEO of the Institute for Global Futures) insists the electronics revolution is over. Apparently the next revolution after that will be the Neuro revolution, and by 2025, the most popular celebrity around Hollywood will be artificial. Some would say that’s already the case.

It may be of interest to note we discovered air pollution has been linked to DNA mutations in Sperm, which we think should motivate the politicians even if nothing else will.

Our working method was to test scenarios by interrogating the assumptions of this research while exploring some of the implications that we found provocative. In saying that, we are looking to explore a more complex future than naive cliché’s such as

Dubai = Bad
Green  = Good

Materiality = good
Technology = bad

We prefer…
dubai + green
Material + technology

Parenthetically, we thank the RAIA for formalizing the relationship with Google Earth. This surely is a great step forward for architecture in Australia which will bring Australian architecture to the world. 5 text messages and 23 and a half minutes after the announcement on Friday night, we took the liberty of preemptively hacking our work into the system in preparation for our future

We believe information will be material. Our proposal vizualizes the key political issue of 2050:

- the shift from peak oil to the balkanisation of energy: a vision in which islands of integrated energy technologies will sustain and politically reorganise the Sydney suburban landscape.

We’ve looked at integrating our research into intelligent bio-energy surfaces and its relationship to form-making. Interestingly, 80% of the existing fabric of suburb of 2050 already exists today.

Each vertical island will perform on three levels –
1. Orienting industrial-scale solar harvesting flutes north, which will sustain a radius of suburban fabric approximately 5km
2. Accommodating collective social forms based on community sizes of 80-200.
3. Generating novel forms of vertical public space

Our goal was to create a complex future atmosphere, resistant to easy moralizations. In order to deal with this atmosphere,  traditional architectural drawings, a peculiar and unfortunately opaque and enduring form of abstraction, are incapable of integrating issues such as time, ambience, light, context, experience, performance and emotion that are important to a discussion with the public about our future environment. Rather we looked to film and such references as the photography of Andreas Gursky, the work of We love to build and Julian Schnabel’s the Diving Bell and the Butterfly for inspiration.

Rather than relying on the authenticating statistics, diagrams and strategies that underlie our provocations, we preferred to communicate by working across the boundaries of our discipline, hooking up with a fantastic team of film makers and animators from UTS in the adjoining department, who un-like architects, are actually trained to communicate visually with the public.

In the end though, we think of these types of experiments as a vital part of our discipline which we are enthusiastic about embracing.

So, with tongue in cheek just a little, roll ‘em."

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