GOALS

• demonstrate the importance of interactivity and engagement opportunities in our public spaces
• avoid introspective, remote, or solo/individual technology experiences
• utilize technology to facilitate interaction
• use of the physical object to facilitate that interaction
• focus on social sustainability/creation of sustainable environments (ecologically/socially/etc.)

CONNECTIONS TO METAMODERNISM

• progress is inevitable and in the long run ultimately is a good thing
• cultural progress goes along technological change, and that it is your own personal responsibility to see to it that we as humanity get the most out of it
• reconstruction must follow deconstruction, reconstructing our symbolic universe and reconnecting it to other aspects of reality.
• to the metamodern mind, saying what you actually believe to be the truth is of greater importance.
• the metamodern mind knows how to construct feasible syntheses and understands the intimate relationship between both exterior and interior conditions, physical and social variables. That we are 100% biological animals and 100% culturally adapted beings, not 50/50.

STAGES OF FAITH

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_W._Fowler
  Similar structures of scientific reasoning and methods have been described by Michael Lamport Commons.

METAMODERNISM

• believes in reconstructing things that have been deconstructed with a view toward reestablishing hope and optimism in the midst of a period (the postmodern period) marked by irony, cynicism, and despair.
• focuses instead on dialogue, collaboration, simultaneity, and “generative paradox” (this last being the idea that combining things which seem impossible to combine is an act of meaningful creation, not anarchic destruction).
• key terms in metamodernism are dialogue, reconstruction, collaboration, interdisciplinary and transmedia work (collaborations across academic disciplines or creative genres/modes), inter- and hyper-textuality (the creation of new texts through the interaction of existing texts), generative paradox, generative ambiguity, simultaneity, engagement rather than exhibitionism, and, more broadly, the collapsing of artificial distances between concepts and people.
• Metamodernism is likely to take something you’re certain is bad and show you that it’s an opportunity to do something you never imagined before. It’s likely to show two people who think they have nothing in common that the ways in which they’re different empower them to work together much better than any two people “more similar” would be able to. It’s likely to say crazy things like the fact that we live in a “post-truth” culture gives us an opportunity to instrumentalize that very culture in the service of—you guessed it—Truth. (Metamodernism is, in fact, a “post-post-truth” phenomenon for exactly this reason: it takes the wreckage of meaning and goodwill and hope and refashions it into a new “meta-narrative”—a narrative about how we make narratives—that is fundamentally optimistic. For this reason, metamodernists often celebrate so-called “informed naivete,” this being a willful decision to act as though the facts on the ground aren’t the facts on the ground. Informed naivete helps us come up with shockingly fresh ideas. In such instances it’s not that one forgets reality, it’s rather that, informed by reality, one makes a quite conscious decision to temporarily sidestep or even ignore it in service of one’s own mental health and/or the greater good.)

METAMODERN STRATEGIES

• “modding”—the practice of re-coding a video game you’ve purchased to change the narrative or the gameplay somehow. This too is an example of someone recognizing that a thing can be taken apart and then put back together again differently—not to make some ironic commentary on the thing being deconstructed and then reconstructed, but rather to re-imagine it all together. This takes, obviously, enormous creativity—and a lot of optimism about the value of creating things in the first place. Sure, there’s something cynical about feeling like no game you buy is “good enough” the way you purchased it, but there’s also something incredibly idealistic and forward-thinking about feeling empowered to not just change an existing videogame but to want that change to be an improvement you personally authored.

• where postmodernism said that combining “subjectivities” inevitably destroyed most of them, metamodernism holds that overlapping different identities only empowers all of them.) For instance, a remixer is at once speaking through the voice of everyone who she or he is sampling, while also using his or her own creative vision (as a curator of sounds) to create a completely “new” artwork. Meanwhile, a “modder” is mixing their own vision with others’, and anyone who helps shape a meme is simultaneously expressing themselves and the visions of the countless creators and “meme inflectors” who came before them.

NEW SINCERISIST ART

• this is a “new” sort of sincerity not so much because it’s sincere in a different way from, say, what that word and concept meant to the Victorians, but rather in that we—the consumers of contemporary art—have changed so much since the late nineteenth century that we can’t accept sincerity as sincere anymore, and therefore receive it as ironic.
• the purpose of this underground is to find out how to ‘preserve the light’—life; the culture—how to keep things living. What we need is a new language, a language of the heart, some kind of language between people that’s a new kind of poetry. In order to create that language, you’re going to have to learn how you can go ‘through a looking glass’ into another kind of perception, where you have that sense of being united to all things. And suddenly, you understand everything.”As 1981 was pre-internet, a useful exercise is to replace the word “underground,” above, with the word “internet.” Given the “virtuality” of space on the internet, this word-replacement suddenly gives phrases like “invisible planets,” “invisible space journeys,” and “a new kind of school” new meaning.

EXAMPLES OF METAMODERN

• the internet, which has been the enabling technology for many of LaBeouf’s projects, permits the creation and maintenance of invisible, locomotive, non-physical monasteries filled with a “new kind of language” in a way that no one could have imagined in 1981. That’s because the internet allows us to create “a different kind of perception” that gives the sensation of “uniting all things.”
• the internet thus distances and connects us at the same time—very metamodern! So, for instance, flash mobs are metamodern, as is so-called “hash-tag advocacy.” Certain large-scale efforts to re-conceptualize problems—like the push to create an International Flag of Planet Earth—are metamodern because they simultaneously recognize that humans are fractured into groups and also that we must still think of ourselves as having a common purpose. (Keep in mind that metamodernism isn’t about a New World Order; rather, it’s about allowing things to be wholes and parts at the same time. The International Flag of Planet Earth doesn’t mean an end to individual nations, merely a desire to not have the continued existence of nations keep us from seeing how, in certain spheres at least, we do have a common purpose—and need words and images that underscore this fact.)
• listen to Metamodern Sounds in Country Music and ask yourself how this album re-imagines everything we thought we knew about the values and culture and musical practices that traditionally have undergirded country music. Search for the term on Twitter and Facebook and uncover metamodern art like The Flying Japanese Girl or Meow Wolf or Garfield Minus Garfield. Look up things like normcore and chiptune and see how these phenomena marry opposites like nostalgia and futurism (chiptune) or assimilation and idiosyncrasy (normcore). Or consider Sjaak Hullekes’ “high fashion of the small-town boy.” Or Steve Roggenbuck’s equally sincere and ironic poem, “Make Something Beautiful Before You Are Dead.” You get the idea.

RESOURCES

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-snapchat-and-the-dawn-of-the-post-truth-era/

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-is-metamodernism_us_586e7075e4b0a5e600a788cd