On Hope
Dreams vs Reality
A lot of us feel like we're missing something these days. Chaos is our constant companion, pushing many of us into survival mode. It's tough to imagine a brighter future when we’re constantly dealing with adversity. Issues such as geopolitics, climate change and AI are incredibly complex, constantly changing, and yet affect us directly, on a personal level.
In this context, we’ve been thinking about hope. About how we can rediscover it. This seems particularly important at this point in time, given our awareness of how easily it is lost.
Hope is interesting because although often it isn’t visible on the surface, it plays an important role in what we find interesting and gravitate towards. Working with new technology, new forms of storytelling, and ways to share the human experience, is itself a hopeful endeavour. But equally, it brings many unintended consequences that make hope harder to retain.
A Historical Perspective on Hope
How we view the future has changed a lot over the past century. Historically, depending on cultural factors, you could broadly say hope was often tied to religious beliefs, offering comfort against life's hardships and promising a better existence beyond this world. Or to put it another way, power lay mostly outside the self. Hope was intangible.
As religious and spiritual influence faded in daily life, technology began to fulfil our need for belief in something greater than ourselves. Mid-20th-century, science fiction showed us a future with undersea cities, personal robots, and space colonisation. Buzz Aldrin setting foot on the moon could well represent one of the most hopeful images in living memory. These stories made people optimistic about technology and its ability to change our lives and expand outward.
One such story started in the late 1950s. In the build-up to the Cold War, the US Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with building a remote underground base in the Arctic providing defence and supplies for an allied scientific research effort, called Camp Century. It is a perfect example of how hope is interwoven with many other issues. It was publicly promoted as a ‘victory over the elements’, and a symbol of futuristic cities built on the ‘frontier’ of the civilized world.
But it came with challenges and controversy reminiscent of colonial conflicts from a century earlier, and while Camp Century offered hope in the exploration of alternative energy sources, and functioned as a kind of prototype for living on other planets, the legacy of Camp Century is nuanced. It not only left a ticking time bomb with its use of nuclear power, but also the data legacy of Camp Century has helped provide a baseline for future climate research which is still used to this day.
Exploring this unique site, we developed a meticulously reconstructed version of the base using Unreal Engine as a VR experience and linear documentary. You can learn more about it in this long-read post about the research we undertook to build a historically accurate virtual reconstruction of Camp Century.
Camp Century: Reflections on the past, the future, and the value immersive technology can bring
Fostering Hope through Technology
2023 was the year when for many climate change became a part of daily reality. Suddenly it wasn’t a future thing but right there in front of us. And today it keeps getting worse with each new record being broken.
The story around climate change is mostly terrifying let’s be honest, but there are some positive steps being made through technology and changes in our behavior. But will these efforts be enough? And what else could we be doing?
Technology has been a beacon of hope throughout history and can prove useful in projecting a brighter future. VR, in particular, is one creative technology that increases sustainability by promoting remote learning and reducing the need to travel, it also offers the ability to test and prototype things in virtual spaces before committing to build them. Additionally, immersive VR experiences have been shown to help communicate stories about the impact of climate change in more effective ways than traditional media.
The Museum of Imagined Futures, made in collaboration with Indigo Storm, deals with the complexity of climate change more directly. It explores how hope can be seen as a catalyst for action when it is difficult for people to see through the problems of large scale change, and shows how major shifts are already underway.
Guided by an AI character, The Museum teleports you into the future and between virtual worlds to discover projections of what our world could look like in fifty years time. Taking examples of kelp forests, mycelium networks, tree canopies, and visions of green cities, The Museum offers a glimpse into the impact of sustainability projects carried out today.
You can read more about the Future Museum here.
New Connections
One of the best ways to foster hope in unsettling times is by finding new ways to connect with each other, across cultures and languages.
Cyber-utopianism promised a more decentralised, non-hierarchical way of organising society. The digital revolution focused on connectivity and knowledge-sharing on an unprecedented scale, however, it also led to unforeseen consequences, including cultural isolation, a rise in extremism, and a pervasive sense of vulnerability among global populations. These developments have somewhat dimmed the once-bright outlook for a technology-driven future.
AI, still in its infancy, is already creating much greater change in far less time. 2023 was again the year that brought AI to the daily lives of many, making it tangible rather than science fiction, and with it came a confusing wave of optimism and fear that is still washing over us right now.
And although the opportunities for knowledge sharing are huge, AI can feel like it’s just driving us further apart and taking away our creativity.
We have been exploring ways to use AI as a tool for enhancing human connections with the development of an AI-powered app that offers travellers a gamified experience to learn languages while on the go. Lissom uses computer vision to recognise hundreds of objects around you and translate them in real-time from English to a language of your choice, almost instantly. Just point your phone as some fruit, or vehicles, or furniture, and learn how to say and pronounce it in Thai, or Spanish.
We have been working to develop Lissom into a fully-fledged product, built around the mission to encourage travellers to explore their environment and interact with native speakers in the location they are visiting, wherever they are. We are focused on finding new ways to encourage people to share knowledge in a playful way.
Creative Solutions
Today, virtual worlds, games, and virtual reality offer new realms to explore—spaces where physical limitations don’t apply. But are we trying too hard to escape reality? These digital spaces don't address the big challenges we face, like climate change and social inequality, but they can offer visions of an alternative future. Our society is more connected yet more challenged by the global climate crisis than ever before.
While dreams of space exploration and virtual worlds provide temporary relief, today’s technology can offer real-world steps to improving our chances, whether that’s using energy-heavy render farms to heat swimming pools, as Dirty Looks is doing in the UK, or using AI in reforestation projects, as Morpho is doing in Brazil.
Conclusion
Balancing hope and action is delicate. It's easy to get lost in dreams, but staying grounded in reality is essential. By engaging with our aspirations and framing the tools at our disposal, like AI, to be focused on building a future where hope is a lived experience.
If you’re interested in this, or anything related to the work we do at Studio ANRK, get in touch with us.