*Dr. Skeptical Futuryst is bringing major noise today.
http://futuryst.blogspot.com/2011/03/beer-flavoured-design-fiction.html
(...)
So what, then, amid all these fictitious past and future artifacts, of my concerns about the beer's bona fides? Well, Black Star is indeed a product of the Great Northern Brewing Company, based in Whitefish, Montana, although the label I have next to me says 'Brewed and bottled by Great Northern Brewing Company, Milwaukee WI' (which set off my alarm bells, that city famously being home to Miller Brewing Company). At any rate, the brew was first introduced to an Oregon test market in the early 01990s, was out of production for most of the '00s, and then relaunched in 02010. But incongruously, the label claims 'a family tradition of unique brewing since 1856'. A bit of research turned up a San Francisco Examiner article from back in 01996, which helpfully deconstructs the company's 'instant history'. (Just add water... malted barley, and hops. And a bunch of marketing.)
In general, I find it extremely interesting the way both history and future narratives are recruited to provide a sense of substance – for both fun and profit – to something that would otherwise lack it. I don't mean to speak of this specific product in isolation (and this post is intended neither to criticise nor to promote it), but the case throws into relief, both in its consciously satirical ('make-believe history'; mid-21st century mockumentary) mode, and in its seemingly earnest ('since 1856') mode, the ubiquity and importance of the back-stories about the things we interact with, and choose to consume.
As the saying goes, when truth and legend collide, print the legend. To this we might add: if there isn't an adequate legend, make one up. (Can we really doubt that there's a good deal of that in how 'actual' history gets made, or rather, canonised?)
(...)
*And on Vimeo, the planet's source for auteur high-definition conceptual weirdness, a solid hour and sixteen minutes on "How to Build a World":
Design Futures: Stuart Candy (Arup) - How to Build a World from Elizabeth Goodman on Vimeo.
"Design Futures lecture series
sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media and the School of Information
"The art of developing, exploring and communicating alternative futures is in an exciting and rapid phase development, with the emergence of overlapping practices, and their respective discourses, around experiential scenarios, transmedia storytelling, and design fiction. This talk is a dispatch from the frontier of world building – future creation and communication – from one of its pioneers. It will explore the principles informing both the most and least successful strains of experimentation, and points to where all this could be leading, and why.
"Stuart Candy, a.k.a. the sceptical futuryst, is a designer, consultant, writer, educator, and activist. He is currently Senior Foresight and Innovation Specialist at the design and engineering firm Arup, and Adjunct Professor in the Design Strategy MBA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He became the first Research Fellow of the Long Now Foundation in 02006. Stuart received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa for work on experiential scenarios, an approach to immersive storytelling at the intersection of futures, design, and politics. Originally from Australia, he also holds an LLB and a BA in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Melbourne."
