Peterborough in Transition_The 2040 Workshop

CAN YOU IMAGINE IT? - WHAT MIGHT MY LIFE BE LIKE IN 2040?

OR

The "28 YEARS LATER" Workshop

 This article is about the workshop run by Luke Payn from the Blok Collective on the Launch Day of Peterborough In Transition at The Green Backyard on Sat June 9th 2012.

We were asked by Sophie Antonelli if we could run one of our sessions at Peterborough's Transition Town launch. There were several aims of this session; to see what people were thinking about at this point in time, to create a sort of TimeCapsule, a record or document for posterity-something we could look at in 2040, and as a yardstick- we could ask this question again in say three years and compare answers, and lastly to get people thinking about these questions at a personal level and stimulate discussion around the launch of "Transition Peterborough".

Predicting the future is possibly one of the hardest things  for us to do. But hoping, praying, planning, wishing and dreaming about our futures is something we all do everyday. It is also something that business, government, kings, dictators and similar societies and groups do all the time, in fact not just Predicting it, but Forging it, twisiting the future to their will and to their interests.

It is a difficult question to ask, some people do the maths, and clearly the answer is that they may not be alive by then, - highlighting peoples mortality at a celebration event on a (reasonably) sunny day is at times a bit awkward. And of cousre young children can only respond with a sort of cartoon fantasy scenario as the whole idea of being old is really quite alien to any child, they sort of look at you as if say 'what a silly question.'

Their answers though were quite telling in that they were full of optimisim and a sense of fear was absent, although some young boys did start talking about China and how it may be a global dictator.
A young boy wanted to a racing car driver, and young girls wanted to be married with kids to the pop-star of the day. So like everyone else they want a safe, emotionally stable and happy future doing the thing they love and being with the person they fancy, rasing a family.

For Transition Towns thinking about the future is vital as it allows us to build a sense of direction and then working back we can see what needs to be put in place now and in the near future.

Transition Towns and the Transition movement is essentially about preparing for the future as the supply chain and the resources and amenities we take for granted now become unstable, rationed, expensive  or dissappear alltogether. It is about making communities resilient to that change. And communities are made up of individuals. So if individuals in a commnity have a better sense of their possible futures then the community at large can, in theory, start becoming better prepared.

We wanted to bring the question of 'what will life be like in the future?' away from the global perspective and pull it into the daily nitty-gritty, 'what will YOU be doing in 2040?'

What will daily life be like? 

Asking this question many people's first response was,
'do you mean what I think it will be like, or what I want it to be like?"

So the seperation between what people hope for and what they believe will happen is quite prevelent. 

And this really gets to the crux of the matter. 

Most people don't want war, or our forests to be destroyed, or people to have dirty drinking water, or politicians to consistantly betray us-but all these things happen.

so it was hard for people to respond without dividing between "I Predict This..." and "I Hope For This...", or a similar divisions.

I took the main question and split into as many permutations as I could, so people didn't get too stuck on semantics and free up their answers, or inspire different thought paths.
e.g.

What Might My Life Be Like In 2040?

In 28 Years I Will Be....
In 28 Years we will have...

What Will My Life Be Like In 2040?

In The Year 2040 Peterborough Will Be....

In The Year 2040 There Will Be....

and then going a next layer into the question I asked more precise questions such as;
where will you be working?
what kind of work will be available?
will the world be a better place in 2040?
what sort of new technology is available?
where will you buy your shopping from?
what will be on TV?
what currency will you be using?
what will the Health care system look like?
how will you communicate with friends and family?
how will you vote and Who can you vote for?
what will our schools and colleges look like?
what will the social structure be like?
in the Year 2040 What currency will we be using?

If you have any answers to the above please leave them in the comments box, I'd love to hear your responses!

--

It is certainly a session that I hope to run again, if you have a group / venue you would like to run this session with please get in touch. -it is a prickly question and at the fat end of the wedge there really is no right or wrong answer. however as you drill into the question some veryinteresting questions arise!

Flying Cars, obviously.....

                                                                                                                                          

VJ workshops for the iCreate project with Beat This

I have just embarked on an exciting run of workshops with Beat ThisCiC, running from January to April of 2012.

Beat This (CIC) have been running a project called “iCreate” which has taken groups of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and given them a ten week project where they will create visual and audio content with the aim of producing either a final recorded piece or a live performance, (or both!). It's all about process and connecting different artistic disciplines. So using photography, video clips and artwork to be used later in VJ'ing alongside a finished recording or performance. The groups have been developing their own pieces as individuals and engaging in group decision making, combining their output in the final instance as a collaborative piece.

one of the images produced by the students using NuVJ equipment,

I will be presenting the groups with the VJ'ing element of their projects.

By the time I come in they will have worked with other Beat This practioners and developed and created some artwork, some video clips and be close to finishing their music track.

Then we will load all this up into the awesome machine known as “NuVJ”, more on that another time.

 Despite having done hundreds of workshops, and having also perfomed live visuals of one kind or another at hundreds of events, I have only done one VJ workshop before, so these sessions have been a wonderful learning experience for me too.

My first sessions were at A.C.E. The Alternative Curriculum Education centre, this is a place where pupils who have been excluded, or partially excluded from secondary schools in Peterborough, go to finish their education.

The original idea was to develop all the elements to put on a final performance, however with the group at ACE it was clear that this was not the direction that they wanted to go, so after the first session we decided to flip it to making a Music Video, which left us 4 hours to produce a music video with them. Their experience of education and adults was such that it was a struggle to get the students to engage or be enthusiastic, but the idea of a video that could go up on YouTube seemed to be something that grabbed their attention, so music video it was. 

They were a little bit shocked when we explained how much a music video would cost to produce, at least the glossy chart ones, and how much time and the number of people that would be involved in the production. With our four hours of production time it was going to be interesting to say the least! However, we would be using the NuVJ to generate imagery, and we had already shot quite a number of videos previously when my brother did a grafitti session with them, using fat chalk pens to tag perspex and film this. So we had some pretty cool footage to work with.

The video is all but finished, and is now in what is known as Post-Production, i.e. me, finishing the audio layer, and compressing and saving ready to publish. Otherwise they managed to get something finished, just about, in the timeframe.

I have only worked at two of the schools in this project so far, so lots more sessions still to do which is very exciting!

Watch out for the final video and updates on more adventures with Beat This CiC!