For nearly three months this year, Vienna was overflowing with questions about the future as the city鈥檚 Biennale opened its doors. Giant exhibitions at the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) were at the heart of the show, but around the city, many others pitched in, from artists in their studios, to makers in workshops and urban farmers in greenhouses. Visitors could even tour new forms of urban art by bicycle, or tune into provocative talks and essays from curators, thinkers and activists.
Intrigued, I found plenty to like during a few days circling the show. There was the cute plan for a vertical village built by a swarm of flying robots. And then some wonderful whimsy in the shape of modular furniture you could adjust with an app, which, if ignored for too long, would start rearranging itself.
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But there was darkness too, fear that the future had slipped out of our control into the hands of the unknown, or to the 鈥淒ata Kraken鈥�. This is not the Data Kraken you find in a quick Google search, but a name coined in Germany for the scary corporate beasts whose digital tentacles threaten to suck the life out of us.
The with 12 questions and answers. But none of those capture the raw fears, hopes and dreams I experienced there. To reflect a more direct experience, here鈥檚 my own list.
Fear: Anxiety about job loss was everywhere, with lists of jobs that robots are expected to destroy, and plenty about the erosion of work security and personal identity that looms as the gig economy grows. The most common solution for life in the digital world was a universal basic income, which would free us to face change without insecurity. But is that enough? The first industrial revolution created jobs we could not have imagined 鈥� and created new social institutions after decades of struggle. Do we need a change on that scale; if so, what would it look like?
Trust: Will digital technology help us or turn us into hopeless dependents? An artwork entitled Knife. Hand. Chop. Bot tested your trust, by playing a macho game where you spread your fingers on a table and a knife chops between them. In theory, a robot should perform perfectly. But there is a twist: if you don鈥檛 trust the robot, it detects your sweat response and starts making mistakes鈥� In a story written for the Biennale by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling (and turned into a wall-sized video display), a group of kids from a near-future sit around moaning: 鈥淲e all deeply resented being raised by bad software and a torrent of social media prompts.鈥� Will they be your kids?
Unpredictability: Slogans for the Twenty-First Century from Canadian artist Douglas Coupland, filled a wall at MAK. One read: 鈥淭he unanticipated side effects of technology dictate the future鈥� It is true. Whatever we create, from the first stone axe, changes the world in ways we could not imagine, pushing us to react. Thus we are driven endlessly on, we know not where.
Predictability: Are humans and robots changing places? We can鈥檛 move without creating a trail of data, and we suspect AI systems will soon come to analyse us better than we can. The scary thing is we cannot see how the machines work nor access the motivation of their owners. As one curator, Amelie Klein, put it: 鈥淚鈥檓 not afraid of the technology itself but of the people behind it鈥� They鈥檙e the ones who utilise robots 鈥� for their own goals and agenda.鈥� Are you happy for us to be transparent to robots while they are opaque to us?
Helplessness: The digital world is full of wonders but there is too much of everything, except time. Sophie Loidolt, a University of Vienna philosopher, made the point in a video installation: 鈥淭here is a kind of futility in this constant鈥β� imperative to produce things, texts, identities鈥�.We can only concentrate on something for a specific amount of time, we can only be awake during the day for a specific period and we don鈥檛 live forever. These are the challenges of finiteness in the face of an infinite flow of data.鈥�
Are there cures? Possibly. Try localism: the best lives are rooted in your surroundings. How to make production local becomes critical, and inspiration flows from 3D printing, open-source software and modular design that powers self-build for everything from furniture to housing. Then there is the imperative to protect the 鈥渃ommons鈥�: that is, the goods to which everyone should have equal rights, including air, water, land, and information. But is this communitarian idealism or a step towards鈥�
Utopia: This may not be what you think. Artists Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler provide a working model in LeveL 鈥� the Fragile Balance of Utopia, for me MAK鈥檚 most thought-provoking exhibit. LeveL is a giant, delicately balanced mobile of rods and lights which hangs in a darkened gallery. In equilibrium, its lights come on and fill the gallery with a soft radiance. Blow on it or touch it, and the disturbance slowly ripples through the system. As it does, its lights dim and the gallery darkens. Gradually, the lights reappear as equilibrium returns. In a single move, it shows utopia is not static but dynamic, subject to endless disturbance, but with the possibility of a new stability.
That fragile, dynamic equilibrium is perhaps what everyone is looking for 鈥� except for the Data Kraken.
. It ran in Vienna, Austria, from 21 June to 1 October 2017
