[Jeremy Mende] 100 Years from Now was my attempt to capture the experience of living in an age defined by a critical conflict of awareness: We are aware of troubling global limits like peak oil, overpopulation, water shortages and climate change — yet our ability to address these issues in a meaningful way is limited. I believe this conflict of awareness produces a collective sense of anxiety, and I was interested in amplifying this sense. People have asked me if this is art, design or activism, but I don’t really feel the need to draw a distinction. Rather, I see it as an effort to make us more aware of what we already feel but don’t know how to talk about.
The visual design was deliberately developed to be a blunt object, physically and semantically opaque, something standing in our path and demanding our attention. The project launched on a February 22 (the anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto) and ran for 30 days, transforming the streets of Rome into a confrontation — a choice to either engage or ignore, and potentially to consider the consequences of our collective inertia.
The larger idea began with the Futurists, an artistic movement from the early 20th century whose advocates expressed a radical optimism about the future. Speed, technology, industrialization and youth — these were their mantra. A hundred years later, I wondered if we aren’t still beholden to these values, but somehow far less optimistic about the world they have created. In the age of Deepwater Horizon, I wondered if we are coming to an end of optimism for these values — an end to Futurism. We have a different look into the future, something I call “Anxious Futurism,” and this is the idea I took to Rome.
Ideas of audience, reception and communication are very important to me, and as I grew more familiar with Rome these kiosks began to stand out.
I wondered: Could this be a viable stage to work on? And what would work, given this context? After some in-situ experimentation I made a proposal to the Comune di Roma (Rome’s city government). After some negotiation they granted me 1000 kiosks for 30 days.
Rome is a city of inscriptions, from monumental to minuscule, all with the patina of time. The city has a tradition of public writing dating back to the formation of the Empire, and as my ideas for public address started to take shape, I began to see the kiosks as real opportunities.
Given the nature of a contemporary urban environment, however, things have to work fast to be noticed. Messages have to separate from the baseline of visual noise, and my early experiments showed that more intimate approaches don’t capture people’s attention on the street.
The idea was fairly simple: use the kiosks to insert provocative poetic fragments into the city — cryptic, open-ended phrases, with as little context as possible. Their ambiguity and repetition were part of their power.
Forcing a decision: to confront or ignore … triggers to construct images of the future …
… suggesting our relationship with time …
… with technology …
… with anxiety …
… with information, truth and the questionable nature of authority.
The signs became cognitive ripples, seen over and over again, every day, in one’s journey through the city … messages that refused to solve themselves … simple but disruptive, both a physical confrontation and a mental confrontation.
As the larger idea was forming, I became interested in creating a feedback channel — a way for people to share their interpretations. The question was how to create this opportunity without diminishing the blankness of the signs. My early work showed that including things like URLs or explanatory texts significantly attenuated the power of the signs, and worse, suggested they were ads in the service of something else.
To solve this, I purchased the individual phrases in Google Adwords. If a user searched one of the phrases in Google, the result would be a banner ad connecting the viewer to the project website.
The site included background information on the project, but its primary goal was to capture and share people’s interpretations.
The site received 20,000 hits in 30 days, and while readings varied widely, they settled in a handful of categories: hope, fear, technology as a savior (a quintessentially Futurist notion) and resignation. There was also, however, an acknowledgement of our own responsibility in the world we are making: We make the present and the future with every small action we take.
In the long run, though, this project was not about answers. It was about creating an experience of confrontation: to be challeneged by one’s own larger choice to engage or to ignore. And for one month in Rome, people voiced their anxieties about an unsustainable world, confronted each other with their hopes, fears, disinterest, ambivalence …
But time passes. Things fade. The city swallows up the experience, and it’s gone. My hope was that the idea of self-awareness and self-confrontation would leave some trace in memory … that the idea of asking existential questions leads to a more-aware behavior.
Ultimately my time in Rome ended, and it was time to return to running my design practice in San Francisco. I have to admit that the transition back was not easy. But after some time to reflect, it occurred to me that there is much more at stake here. What do I want “my work” to be? What do we all want to look back on and understand as our creative contribution to the world?
Right now for me, it’s an intersection between advocacy, confrontation and interpretation. I believe that creating opportunities for interpretation reminds people they have a vote; people sense their agency, and that awareness creates a culture of inclusion. When I think about what I want my work to be, this sounds like a project worth continuing.
Jeremy Mende is a visual artist and designer from San Francisco. In 2000 he founded MendeDesign, a creative practice that balances commercial projects with visual research and public art installations. The studio has been recognized internationally for its work and currently has pieces in several collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mende is a professor of design at California College of the Arts.
Mende will be an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in summer 2012, where he will be producing a large scale installation that continues the ideas brought forth in 100 Years From Now.
Jeremy – WHAT a treat to read this. My admiration is matched by my incredulity that you charmed the administrazione municipale into giving you 1000 billboards for a month! Bravo!