We spent a magical day in Brighton on Thursday, attending the Improving Reality conference, an event organised by the amazing Honor Harger of Brighton’s digital culture agency Lighthouse, with the purpose of exploring the responses of contemporary artists, thinkers, architects and writers to speculative concepts.
We weren’t entirely sure what to expect, which was great, actually, because it meant we went in there with our minds completely open to anything we might see or hear. What we were given, over the course of the conference’s two two-hour sessions, was a serving of contemporary and futuristic culture so enthusiastically radical, so naturally explorative and unaffectedly boundary-breaking, that we were talking about it for hours afterwards. The characteristic that seemed to unite those on stage was exactly that quality of uncompromising zeal you’d hope to find in any artist wholeheartedly consumed by the passion for making new work of any kind.
When people who don’t think they like SF start talking about why they think they don’t like SF, you find that what they’re often put off by is an idea of futurism as a kind of ‘woo’ domain of super-science and dehumanizing technology, surrounded by a sea of jargon and computer code – stuff they either can’t understand easily or don’t relate to, in other words. But what struck me most about the artists of Improving Reality was their generosity of spirit, their inclusiveness, the way they were actively reaching out to lay people and inviting them to contribute – to projects, to thought processes, to discussion. The totally wonderful Leila Johnston (contributor to Wired, managing editor of The Literary Platform), when asked about the essence of the speculative, answered unhesitatingly. ‘It’s the human story.’ she said. ‘The trouble with SF is that people think it’s all tech-y, that it’s all about computers taking over. To be relevant to people, the future has to encompass the personal.’
This idea was also a strong theme in Warren Ellis’s ‘seance for the future‘, in which he encouraged individuals to get excited about the future by properly embracing the present. ‘If the future is dead,’ he said, ‘then today we must summon it and learn how to see it properly.’ Other highlights were Joanne McNeil’s story about what happened when she went in search of the Sanzhi ‘UFO houses’ in Taipei (a personal odyssey far too involving and peculiar to be summed up with the words ‘they’d been demolished’) and Luke Jerram’s slideshow of his Glass Microbiology project, in which he commissioned contemporary glassmakers to reproduce the molecular structure of viruses using blown glass. I was particularly affected by Regine Debatty‘s presentation of Milica Tomic’s ‘Container’ project, which centred around the artist’s response to a little known atrocity of the Afghan war.
Rounding off the conference we had Rebekka Kill, with her musical presentation Facebook is like Disco, Twitter is like Punk, a delightfully new way not just of talking about social media, of analysing what it does, but of explaining it to those who feel threatened by it. I loved every moment.
An important thing to note: five of Improving Reality’s eight keynote speakers were women. This wasn’t a deliberate parity policy on behalf of the organisers – these were simply the speakers they wanted to invite, who they felt best expressed the mindset of the event as a whole. Organisers of future SF conventions, take note – the women you’re looking for are out there, ready to speak. All you need to do is ask. There are no excuses.
And while we’re on the subject of awesome women, the Brighton SF panel that followed the conference gave everyone in attendance the opportunity to get a sneak peek inside Lauren Beukes’s upcoming novel The Shining Girls. from whose pages Lauren was generous enough to give us two readings.
If SF has shown us one thing over the years, it’s how difficult it is to predict the future, but in the case of The Shining Girls I’m going to stick my neck out: it’s going to be good.