Jeff Glassman is a genius. I love this little article. Read it and let us know where you would apply his insights.

He’s a professor at the School for Designing a Society

http://www.designingasociety.net

Counter-Intuitive Behavior for Theatre Composition

Jeff Glassman, 2007

It is to be expected that new social organization, new culture and new political and economic structures will be accompanied by new behavior on even so minute a level as the way one person gestures to another during conversation.  If this is at all a reasonable expectation, then a kind of reverse archeology can be practiced.  In this game, we can postulate observably new behavior found in a future society, extract some sample of it, and bring it home to the present.  We can even put it on a stage, and let it show us something we haven’t seen before.  It may introduce us to the context from which it hypothetically emerged, and that context might be the context of a society in which all forms of violence are relics of an abandoned past.  Or it may introduce us to a context of a society in which the meeting of basic needs has been fully and continuously accomplished, and in which people are passionately engaged in problems of finer living. In any event, these behavioral artifacts found through an archaeology of a future can be a source of new techniques for theatre artists at present.

 A future, to be a future, carries a continuity from a past, and also is not limited to the accumulated fact of that past.  If we consider, for purposes of theatre making, the sufficient continuity from the past to be people – the uninterrupted presence of  humans, of actors – then we need only to construct an item manifesting a clear and significant departure from that past, to claim for that item the status of an artifact of a future. We can find such an artifact by answering questions such as “what has never been done?” or “what is considered impossible in human behavior?” Answers are not difficult to come by.  Simply analyze present day observable behavior into a small number of distinguishable components, mix them up, and proceeds to synthesize those components into a new behavioral whole that has all the component features of the original, only now in a significantly different configuration.  It’s wrong, as any glimpse of a future ought to look when viewed in the present.  If the components we distinguish are things like gesture patterns, vocal phrasings, and spoken texts, and if the mixed up reconnection involves monstrosities such as gesture, voice and text each keeping to the rhythms, contours and meanings of three different conversations, even though they emanate simultaneously from one and the same person, then we have grounds to claim that we have an artifact of behavior from a future (an artifact that can not be found performed by any living being till now).  Such behavior is counter-intuitive and can not be performed by any person unless they become aware of, learn and perfect that performance. 

For its performance, counter-intuitive behavior requires the ability to maintain at least two distinct speech rhythms at the same time – one rhythm in the actor’s visible presence during continuous moving (including all the minute body rhythms and the visible gestures of the mouth during speech) and another in the actor’s audible presence (the audible voice) as if engaged in  conversation with twopartners in two different localities at exactly the same time (one conversation we can only see and another we can only hear). The acquisition of the skills necessary to simulate such behavior – the split emotional investment of the actor in twocontinuous domains – brings a new set of techniques into play in the creation of theatre, theatre being the place where such research rightfully belongs. Those who wish for fundamental, beneficial social change, might be curious as to what theatre could emerge based on the utilization of techniques excavated in this way from an imagined, yet to be made, future.

 If the techniques derived in this game can be applied to an ensemble of actors, they would be capable of performing orchestrated plays in which actors, characters, voices, texts, movement, gesture, action, interaction,emotional expression, dialogue and all the established components of theatre would be redistributed and recombined in complex patterns unfamiliar in the present context of theatre.  The theatre maker could compose the features of theatre as much like a composer of music as like a playwright.  Distributions can be made in which components of behavior that would ordinarily be identified as properties of a single person, or character, would be spread over several actors, and orchestrated by the composer of theatre to take advantage of new freedoms.  No longer would there have to be a strict identification of an actor with a particular character.  Instead, a character could be the outcome of a logic of composed patterning rather than an illusionary natural human.  The concept of a ‘person’ might not any longer fit neatly matched with a particular human body. Characters of this sort might appear to the audience as if they were visitors from an excavated future unknown society, who live in a way we might want to know more about for our own purposes.  At least, the artifacts of their behavior would provide us with material for research.

Cross-posted from John Emerson’s Social Design Notes.

At the intersection of urbanism, DIY, food justice and sustainable agriculture, a crop of artists are making open source gardens and sharing instructions on the web and beyond.

Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray build hydroponic Window Farms from recycled materials. The farms are specifically designed with New York City apartments in mind, and the website invites window gardeners to share photos, plans, designs and information.

Edible Estates is a project to convert the classic American front lawn into a productive vegetable garden. Initiated by architect and artist Fritz Haeg on Independence Day, 2005, several prototype gardens were created in different cities across the United States, with instructions and documentation of the prototype gardens posted to the site. 2009 sites have not been announced, but the group is ideally looking for “A monotonous housing development of identical homes… where the interruption of the endless lawn would be dramatic and controversial.”

The Future Farmers’ Victory Gardens project is fought on two fronts: to deliver urban garden kits to urban farmers across San Francisco, and to ultimately develop and maintain a portion of the original Victory Garden space in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

The Garden is a feature-length documentary film about a 14-acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles that emerged in the wake of the 1992 LA riots. The film chronicles the origins of the plot and the South Central Farmers struggle to prevent it from being demolished.

On the more underground tip, Guerilla Gardening is illicit, nocturnal gardening in a space not your own. guerrillagardening.org lists projects, mostly in London, each with a description, location, photos, and budget. The site includes tips for making your own.

Seed bombing is packing seeds in compressed soil and throwing it into inhospitable or hard to reach places. Artist Liz Christy was the first to use the term in 1973 when she fought urban decay by tossing seed grenades full of sunflower seeds into abandoned New York City lots. Here’s a scan of her original instruction sheet. Christy also co-founded the first community garden in New York City.

Moss graffiti is also good for damp, urban corners. Anna Garforth has done some beautiful work here. Here’s how to make your own.

And onto Gardening 2.0: Landshare is a UK website matching people who want to grown their own food with homeowners with underused space. The site also hosts an active forum for sharing tips and answering questions.

And with your veggies in hand, VeggieTrader is a website for trade, buy or sell homegrown produce.

I’m sure there are many more sites and projects, too. Between the recession and growing concern about industrial food systems, there seems to be something of a renaissance going on here.

I was just looking in my copy of Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde. It’s one of the Studio’s favorite books! Here’s a little quote from it.

“Beware the social system that cannot laugh at itself, that responds to those who do not know their place by building a string of prisons.”

Bite Size Life

With the foreclosure crisis now in full swing, there are almost as many opinions about placing blame as there are folks losing homes. While the folks getting the biggest heaps of blame (and losing their homes) are poor and working class, both the right and the left are also figuring out the multiple ways that shady loans and sketchy banking practices deserve blame as well. We agree wholeheartedly, but we also know that as long as The American Dream is to own your own house, folks will struggle and strive (and get taken advantage of) to do just that. We say, let’s get more imaginative with the dream!

If a big part of the American Dream is owning a house, let’s rethink ownership and let’s reimagine the house. What if what you owned was a super-fly bedroom+ unit, one that could be yours for more like the entry cost of renting an apartment? What if what you shared were spacious kitchens and well-cleaned bathrooms? What if instead of owning that big screen TV—or even the room you watched it in—you checked out your favorite show at the nearby multiplex, for free? If the American Dream includes health and happiness (as well as home ownership) what if the local healer got to live in his room for free?

Or if we wanted to shake up the Dream even more, what if the Dream was to live in as many different homes as possible? Renting would clearly be the move. Or if it was to live as close as possible to the ones we love, sharing parts of our living spaces might be seen as living richly. We think testing some uncoupling of the bed + bath + kitchen = home could be as useful as the uncoupling of ownership + home = dream. And we’re ready to get our there and do some uncoupling…before home + dream = nightmare!

Our first Idea of the Week post is in Youth Urbanism. To get a sense of how we think about urbanism please read this story about Orange New Jersey featuring our favorites! The Fullilove’s and the urbanist Michel Cantal Dupart.

Youth Urbanism

We came up with this term as we thought about the question: How do we—as folk who care about civil society and young people—think about the ways in which cities impact youth? And how do we think about how young people impact cities? It came from a long-term conversation we’ve been having with our colleagues about how we work on population-wide concerns, particularly for youth. Cities tend to be constructed from the perspective of adults, and youth tend to get a bad rap in and from cities. Young people function ideologically as “matter out of place” in many cities, to quote Mary Douglas. Their presence is often reduced to nuisance, and their activities and habits of congregations in cities are suspect to adults. We think that the ways in which youth then become situated and create places for themselves in cities, places from the margins, leads to population-wide problems for youth.

If what we just said in any way rings true to you, and your work in any way intersects with youth and/or cities, we ask you this question: How are youth affected by places that see them as a detriment, a detractor to that place’s imagined set of user experiences? We all know when we aren’t wanted; what happens when this attitude is carried out structurally in real space and time?

Now turn that on its head! If cities were imagined to help youth have a generally good experience of being young and for youth to contribute to everyone’s experience of the city, how would cities look, feel and function? What would need to be different for design to include youth from the get-go? What would be the end result? We think it would be cities that were more interesting for all of us!