dConstruct

Ingrid Burrington

lifewinning.com
@lifewinning
About

Ingrid Burrington writes, makes maps, and tells jokes on a small island off the coast of America. She’s a member of Deep Lab, the author of Networks of New York: An Internet Infrastructure Field Guide, and currently an artist in residence at the Data and Society Research Institute.

Listen to the podcast episode with Ingrid Burrington.

Come With Me If You Want To Live, or How To Survive A Time Travel Paradox

At a conference focused on ‘designing the future’, the concept of and narratives about time travel seem like inevitable topics of conversation. While there are a wide variety of types of time travel stories, the narrative Ingrid has been thinking about the most is the one in which someone from the future (or, depending on how you think about time travel paradoxes, a future) comes to the past and intervenes to rewrite and/or game their present.

Ingrid has been thinking about this particular kind of time travel for a few reasons. One is that she has been kind of obsessed with the Terminator movies (for reasons she’ll get into a little bit later) and the other is she’s been interested in emerging technologies and systems that, while not literally from the future, share certain motivations with the revisionist time traveler. The time machines used today don’t look like Deloreans. They look like NTP servers and low-latency networks, like real-time data streams and predictive models, visitors from algorithmically bestowed futures to let us fix, or at least game, our current conditions.

These systems for forecasting futures, however, often lend themselves to the same predestination paradox or self-fulfilling prophecy faced by the T-800 in the first Terminator movie. SKYNET creates John Connor by trying to kill Sarah Connor, governments create terrorists by trying to find terrorists, capitalism eats itself by trying to move faster than capitalism.

So Ingrid been thinking a lot about this because she’s been thinking about resistance—resistance within time travel narratives and resistance to proscribed futures. How do you design a future with resistance built in? What does that resistance look like? In popular time travel narratives, it tends to look like a lot of property destruction--like taking, or quite literally breaking, time and time machines. While she may not be completely sold on that method, there are some examples of acts of civil disobedience that she thinks might offer some insights into the fragility of futures and why, exactly, the Terminators keep on coming.

Join these men and women in their
vision of the future

See our
fantastic lineup!

Registration
Opening Remarks
Brian David Johnson Designing the Future…and Building It…with Science Fiction!
Matt Novak A Brief History of Tomorrow
Break
John Willshire Metadesign For Murph
Josh Clark Magical UX and the Internet of Things
Chris Noessel Gorgeous Catastrophic
Lunch
Nick Foster The Future Mundane
Carla Diana Designing the Future Through Tangible Storytelling
Ingrid Burrington Come With Me If You Want To Live, or How To Survive A Time Travel Paradox
Break
Dan Hill The City of Things
Mark Stevenson Up for Grabs
Closing Remarks
After Party

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Located in the all new Brighton Space Dome, 2,000 miles above the city of Brighton and Hove. Please make your way to the Brighton Dome Space Port, for your complimentary low earth orbit shuttle service.

Accommodation

Looking for somewhere to stay while in this friendly, futuristic city? Check out the Brighton page on AirBnB for local dwellings.

There are plenty of hotels too: Ibis, MyHotel, Artist Residence, Jury’s Inn, and Fhloston Paradise to name just a few.

To eat

For traditional earthly sustenance, you could beam yourself to the weekly Street Diner food market. There are also lots of ground-level restaurants and cafés nearby, where you can grab a bite during the lunch break (the lunch break lasts for an hour and a half so you’ll have plenty of time).

For liquid refreshment, the popular fuel known as ‘coffee’ is available from purveyors such as the Small Batch Coffee Company (on New Road, very close to the Brighton Dome Space Port).

  • Burgers and Cocktails
    15 North Road
    Brighton BN1 1YA
    (on Sept 11th, show your dConstruct pass & get 20% off food orders)*
  • Coho
    83a Queens Road
    Brighton BN1 3XE
     
    53 Ship Street
    Brighton BN1 1AF
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  • Gourmet Burger Kitchen
    44–47 Gardner Street
    Brighton BN1 1UN
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  • Kooks
    56 Gardner Street
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  • Taylor St Baristas
    28 Queens Road
    Brighton BN1 3XA
    (on Sept 11th, show your dConstruct pass & get 20% off all hot drinks)*
  • Strada
    160–161 North Street
    Brighton BN1 1EZ
    (on Sept 11th, show your dConstruct pass & get 20% off food bill​)*
  • Las Iguanas
    7–8 Jubilee Street
    Brighton BN1 1GE
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  • Pizza Express
    A3 Block, Jubilee Street
    Brighton BN1 1GE
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  • E-kagen
    22–23 Sydney Street
    Brighton BN1 4EN
*Cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer

Presented By

Clearleft is a user experience design consultancy based in Brighton, UK. We design delightful digital experiences.