Written and Illustrated by Marc Ngui
Welcome to Dee Double Dub is a 12 page black and white comic which proposes a radically optimistic and speculatively pragmatic vision of a eutopian human habitation in the Detroit River region of North America circa 2200 CE. In the proposed scenario,a Global Green New Deal has paved the way for an extensive retooling and restructuring of human civilization, which has transformed it into an equitable culture that respects the environmental boundaries of the planet. The D.W.W. Urbiome (Detroit-Windsor-Waawiyataanong Urbiome) is an ecologically integrated metropolis situated on the Detroit River in the Southern Great Lakes Ecoregion. It is a benevolent civic structure that has evolved to enable all of its inhabitants, human and otherwise, to thrive.
Welcome to Dee Double Dub was written and drawn in the spring and summer of 2020. In the fall of 2021 it was included in the exhibition Future Present: Design in a time of Urgency by Science Gallery Detroit in a design exhibition space in downtown Detroit, MI.
You can press pause and move forward or backward for better reading.
How I got to Dee Double Dub : Situating my practice as an artist
I was born in Georgetown, Guyana in the early 70’s. My family emigrated to Canada a few years later. We settled in Windsor ON, a small Canadian manufacturing town sitting on the south bank of the Detroit River, to the north sits the manufacturing and musical behemoth, Detroit, MI. This region is the setting for “Welcome to Dee Double Dub”. I spent my childhood and adolescence in this area. I left for university and returned after two decades of global wandering and creative adventures.
My ethnic background is bi-racial with long histories of migration in both ancestral lines. It seems that my people were constantly moving to find a better place. This background enables me to look at the problems of human culture with a well integrated multicultural perspective. Also, I identify strongly with nomadic movements of people, ideas and technology, and of the potential for hybrid cultures to mutate and evolve into more resilient forms.
I have come to speculative art and design through the convergence over time of several axes of my artistic practices and personal ethics:
- The study of architecture – the projects I produced tended to veer towards the as-yet unbuildable. It was the work of the visionary ‘paper’ architecture (by the likes of Lebbeus Woods, Paolo Soleri and Archigram) that fired my imagination drove my creative impulses.
- The production of Post-punk/diy/activist minded cultural of zines, comics, diagrams and other forms of visual storytelling. After university, I participated heavily in the indy culture / do it yourself ethic and anti corporate movements of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.
- A fascination with imaginary worlds in movies, novels, and video games. The fictional worlds created as settings for narratives have always held a special fascination for me. Maps drawn in the end pages of sci-fi and fantasy novels are a good example of this. I often find the setting as captivating as the narrative. And some times when the narrative lags it is the setting that keeps my interest in the work, this is particularily true for video games.
- Concern as a global citizen of a culture that is stuck in a growth /extraction complex that has been devastating planetary life support systems for decades. Plus the realisation that there are solutions for correcting this situation, and that it imagination and cooperation to implementing them.
Future Present at Science Gallery Detroit : Call for submissions
I had just recently moved back to this region when I learned about a call for proposals for Future Present: Design In a Time of Urgency, an exhibition by Science Gallery Detroit in to be held in the fall of 2020. The call was for projects that answered questions like “…how does the design of technology impact society? What impact does design have on the built environment, and on the communities that occupy it? How does design feature in food systems and food security, in biology and scientific inquiry? And what is the entwinement of design with social visions, such as Afro or indigenous futurism? The exhibition is especially interested in the impact of design on society, and in equitable and sustainable social change.” (From Science Gallery Detroit Future Present website)
In addition to being very local to me, the call aligned serendipitously well with one of my current creative projects, a world-building exercise I refer to as Future Parfait. I submitted a proposal to Science Gallery Detroit and it was accepted. This led to the creation of Welcome to Dee Double Dub using the methods of Future Parfait.
What is Future Parfait?
Future Parfait is a radically optimistic speculative world building practice. It is a long-term research creation project that is currently the focus of my work as an artist.
Future Parfait begins with a thought experiment and a pair of precepts that sets up a speculative methodology for imagining eutopian futures.
The thought experiment goes like this:
“Imagine your own perfect world, making space for all others.
Imagine it evolving from the present day.”
Future Parfait comes from applying a radically optimistic worldview to this thought experiment. This worldview is characterised by two precepts/beliefs:
1) Compassionate, cooperative co-existence is a more potent evolutionary force than aggressive competition for resources in human culture.
2) Humanity has the knowledge and capability to adapt and become a just, equitable, and sustainable civilisation which respects planetary boundaries, where each “Other” is supported in the realization of their best future.
The purpose of Future Parfait is to create a positive vision of the future of humanity and the earth that is inspired by current trajectories in evolution, ecology, culture and technology. Progressive ideas and technologies of the present day are extrapolated into the future, and then presented as drawings, comics, poetry, architectural and urban design schematics, and eventually digital models.
This practice developed as a response to the overwhelmingly dark and ominous scenarios that have come to dominate the popular imagination when it comes to stories about the future. It addresses the need for new visions of the future that move beyond exploitative systems with dystopian outcomes which colonize the mind with despair and pessimism. It creates a space which encourages a radically optimistic approach to imagining equitable and ecologically integrated cultures as a way of moving towards better possible futures.
This practice is shaped by an assemblage of concepts that have accumulated like katamaris around the central thought experiment and two precepts. Incorporating ideas from philosophy, sociology, psychology, science, etc. to construct a worldview, a centre of gravity or cosmology .
The assemblage evolves and changes as new information and better practices are aggregated into the Future Parfait scenario worldview. The assemblage of ideas that shapes Future Parfait is well represented in the side notes of Welcome to Dee Double Dub.
You can see more aspects of Future Parfait at https://happysleepy.com/art/future-parfait/
Future Parfait in relation to Future Studies
I started participating in the Future Studies discourse in earnest in December of 2020 after I was able to virtually attend the UNESCO High Level Futures Literacy Summit. The summit was a great introduction to the burgeoning world of Future studies and participitory futures. It was here that learned about the Global Swarm community; participation in which led to the inclusion of my work on this blog.
While I did have some peripheral knowledge of the formal disciplines of foresight and scenario planning, my interest in speculative, eutopian imaginaries began in architecture school after being introduced to the discipline of visionary architecture. It was the work of Paulo Soleri and Archigram that really ignited my imagination and motivation to create possible worlds. More recently Future Parfait has also been inspired by the emerging practice of speculative design.
Approaches to World Building
My worldbuilding strategy evolved from a foundation of architectural design.
1. Cultural History/Context:
The study of a culture and how it evolves was a foundation of my education at architecture school. Understanding the cultural context is essential to effectively designing buildings and other semi-permanent objects. The speculative cultural history of the Future Parfait scenario is a critical part of the project. The thought experiment and precepts establish an ideal scenario to move towards, and then the creation of a speculative cultural history show how that scenario “evolved”. It is like reverse engineering a cultural history to support the desired outcome, in this case the Future Parfait scenario.
1a. The Future Parfait scenario: Many stories, one timeline:
The main structural element of the Future Parfait scenario is the timeline. The timeline documents the evolution of concepts into the Future parfait scenario. The timeline currently extends 250 years into the future and 200 years into the past. I find inclusion of the past on the timeline to be very helpful for speculative thinking by a) putting the present into perspective, b) indicating the rhythm of history, especially it’s current acceleration, c) setting the stage for the speculative exercise.
For WTDDD, a timeline was drawn parallel to the Future Parfait scenario, on which the narrative of The Detroit Windsor Waawiyaataanong Urbiome was extrapolated and mapped. The narrative in WTDDD synthesizes many elements of the Future Parfait world building scenario. The timeline of events presented on pages 2-3 would be consistent across all stories taking place in the Future Parfait scenario. Essential FP concepts such as urbiomes, maker cultures, decentralized governance, communities of care were incorporated into this speculation.
Other Future Parfait projects share the common Future Parfait timeline. In this way one scenario functions as the structure of many narratives.
1b. Survey contemporary and historical best practices and assemble relevant signals into scenarios.
I have found that when one starts to look for ideas and technologies that point towards solutions, one quickly becomes overwhelmed by the amount of activity that is going on towards solving the big problems of civilisation that align with and support the Future Parfait thought experiment and precepts. It is apparent that people are engaging with these issues at all scales (from personal to global) and across many practices and disciplines around the world. One of the intentions of the Future Parfait scenario is to link these groups and solutions in a work of speculative fiction, to imagine them cooperating and evolving together.
I have tried to include as many references to this contemporary practices In WTDDD, the three pillars of the Global Green New Deal (Democratic Confederation, Donut Economics, Half Earth Policy) are a good example of three concepts that align with the Future Parfait scenario and which all have active contemporary practitioners.
2. Physical Context/Site: Engage local knowledges:
Architectural education stresses the importance of understanding the site where something is to be built. All places have unique elements, specific nuances and characteristics that make them special or unique. A strong design will address these elements in order to make the design relevant to its location.
I grew up in this region so I had significant embodied experience and knowledge to draw from regarding its socio-political history and ecological state. This knowledge was reinforced with reading about the geological history of the region, early inhabitation patterns as well as descriptions of the local eco-districts and eco-regions.
In addition to this reading, the central document that was used as a starting point for a speculative exploration of how this area might develop future was the Detroit Future City Strategic Framework.
The DFC Strategic Framework is a shared vision for Detroit’s future that resulted from a massive, citywide public engagement effort. It recommends a series of ideas, strategies and approaches on how to best use the city’s abundance of land, foster job growth and economic prosperity, ensure vibrant neighborhoods, build an infrastructure that serves citizens at a reasonable cost, and maintain the high level of community engagement integral to the long-term revitalization of Detroit.
Detroit residents and civic leaders, from both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, shared their work publicly at key points and shaped it in response to changing information and community feedback throughout the process.
https://detroitfuturecity.com/strategic-framework/
This document was very helpful in getting a sense of the City of Detroit’s best vision of itself. It outlined environmental challenges and projected growth plans, cultural trends and also proposed pathways and priorities for urban development.
The speculative creation of the DWW urbiome relies heavily on the information in Detroit Future City. You could say if the DFC study set the stage for Welcome to Dee Double Dub. The Dee Double Dub scenario is an extension of the Detroit Future City Strategic Framework. If the DFCSF was looking out 50 years, then WTDDD extends that view to 200 years through the lens of the Future Parfait scenario while staying true to the direction of Detroit Future City Strategic Framework. It might be considered a pataphysical extension of the DFCSF
3. Describe the world at many scales:
Another aspect of archi design education at work in this process of speculative design is the consideration of design elements at many different scales; from site plans to hand-rails, providing descriptions at both human and urban scales really helps the audience inhabit the speculative world. A good example of this in WTDDD is the description of structural of columns in urbiome.
Public Reception
The work was presented as 12 large format pages for the audience to read, additionally 200 printed versions were published and distributed to the visiting public. Unfortunately the exhibition took place during the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and I was not able to attend the exhibition. It is unfortunate that the pandemic place such heavy restrictions on the pubic interaction with this work.
WTDDD was selected for inclusion in Galvanized Suns, an online exhibition organized by the curatorial collective Diasporic Futurisms, and hosted by Subtle Technologies in Toronto. A 13 minute storytelling video was created for this exhibition which took place in fall of 2020.
Post mortem / next steps
In retrospect there are several interesting results from this research creation project.
- Welcome to Dee Double Dub outlines the Future Parfait scenario as a whole. It functions like a holographic unit of the scenario, a small piece that contains the whole inside of it.
- The finished piece is much more “clinical” than I had intended it to be. It feels like a guidebook establishing the culture of a place rather than the narrative of what it might be like to live in that place. In that sense, a next step might be to write more personal, fun stories about people living and doing things in Dee Double Dub.
- WTDDD is the work of a single person referencing a wide body of work. I think that a next logical step would be to work with other groups and individuals in the extrapolation of the Future Parfait scenario. Collaborating with others is an essential aspect of the future parfait worldview; practicing this collaboration in the design exercise is the right first step. One possible approach to build out the world would be to offer WTDDD as a story“bible” for the Future Parfait scenario, and invite other writers and creators to explore in their own creations in the world of Dee Double Dub. Collaborators could including other designers/thinkers , anyone with a strong passion for imagining futures, professional or otherwise and eventually community stakeholders.
References
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