MacGuffin

From the influence of California's desert ecologies on Frank Herbert's Dune, through the rain-drenched Los Angeles of Blade Runner, the radical politics and flexible identities of Ursula K. Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, to the rump of George Lucas' Star Wars universe whose form and situation mirror the Bay Area — radical speculation on the future of cities, nature and technology is a globally influential phenomenon born here.

In this project I started several parallel explorations into how science fiction — its visual language and scenario-based narratives — can help us imagine the future of California. The work is structured as a series of researches: a compendium of images, strategies, scenarios, props, and geographies.

Shapes

When constructing and filming the surface of Star Wars' Death Star in 1976, former students and employees of Berkeley's Institute for Urban Research and Development (IURD) deployed techniques used in urban simulation — not only camera motion (the Dykstravision computer-controlled model camera developed by John Dykstra in his work at Berkeley for Donald Appleyard) but also the building-up of complex, urban-like surfaces from multiple component parts. As a result, the surface of the Death Star, while seemingly infinitely complex, consists of only a few shapes, rotated and interleaved across its surface. A single language of shape and repetition is allowed to construct an entire world.

Density & Scale

Since the 1930s the term “MacGuffin” has been used in film to describe an object that may itself be of unclear narrative value, yet nevertheless drives the plot and action forwards. Non–sci-fi examples include the Maltese Falcon (in The Maltese Falcon), the Holy Grail in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the Letters of Transit in Casablanca.

Starting with a printout of a single one of my collage drawings, and using clear tape and a sharp X-Acto blade, I transformed the drawing into a three-dimensional one — translating it into a closed, volumetric shape according to its own logic.

Based on my drawings and collages, my MacGuffin holds the qualities of both scale and density: objects of different scales and densities are assembled together, and the connections between them become the focus of the work going forward.

The Tesla Factory is an automobile manufacturing plant in south Fremont, California. In 2011, Tesla moved from 20 hand-assembled “alpha builds” to 50 “beta builds” — production-validation vehicles built entirely at the factory. The process uses more than 160 specialist robots, including 10 of the largest robots in the world. As technology accelerates, more and more products could soon be assembled or 3D-printed by robotic arms.

Artificial Landscape

The “cone of plausibility” is a technique from scenario planning, often drawn as a flashlight beam widening into a range of possible futures.

Drawing on these studies, my MacGuffin combines scenario with elements that explicitly reference the tectonics of the built environment at architectural, landscape, and urban scales. It becomes plausible for robotics and 3D-printers to take the place of human labor in producing things across scales — from a pair of shoes to an artificial landscape.

Small, everyday things — shoes, clothes — could be produced and customized at home rather than in shopping malls; people might simply buy an annual authorization (a 3D printer for fabric) from Nike or Adidas. Factories making cars or larger things would supply the center of the micro-city or the tower, and the robot-run factories would recycle the machines they make obsolete.

Cities & Technologies

Factories once moved outside the city because they were noisy and polluting. But many are now cleaner, and could find a new place in the urban environment. Bringing them back would raise quality of life — letting employees walk to work, or drive far less — while the spaces they vacate are given over to a shared, common life, everything customizable with tiny 3D-printers.

In the end, through my MacGuffin, I want to ask what technology means to human beings, and how it might shape our future lives — as some of the spaces we know today disappear with the development of cutting-edge technology.