The Divided States
A Speculative Trip to Post-COVID America
Overview
For this project, my team (see “Collaborators” list at the bottom of this post) was challenged to imagine societies and objects in a world where COVID-19 has become a permanent global presence. Our process was guided by the definitions of Speculative Design outlined in the book, “Speculative Everything”, by Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne.
This documentation has been separated into sections (1) a brief description of Speculative Design as it applies to our process, (2) an overview of our societies, (3) a more in-depth explanation of the “communes” society of which I was primarily responsible, and (4) an in depth look into the speculative objects I created for the communes.
1 — Speculative Design
While design is generally understood as a process of “problem solving”, it still functions within the constraints of whatever context (political, social, economic, etc.) it is produced in, and thereby reinforces those constraints. In the face of overwhelming contemporary issues, perhaps best epitomized by our global climate emergency, Dunne & Raby argue this kind of design is not enough. In order to address these problems, speculative designers must reformulate the systems and ideologies of the society from the ground up.
As we understand them, some of the core ideas we took from this text are as follows:
- Although Speculative designs themselves can embody any level of utopianism or dystopianism, they should ultimately provoke viewers to imagine hopeful alternatives to our present.
- Speculative design should focus on posing interesting and/or difficult questions rather than giving concrete answers. In other words, avoid being didactic at all costs.
- Speculative design should not attempt to foresee the future. It should favor provocation over realism or believability.
2 — Overview of Societies
In order to unify our individual societies, our group began by creating a set of overarching circumstances:
- In the near future, COVID-19 rapidly mutates to become even more deadly. Approximately 50% of people naturally have immunity. However those who become sick die at a rate of 25% (meaning in areas which take no precautions, about 12.5% of the population dies).
- The longevity of the virus has contributed to its contagion. It can now travel for miles through the air, live on surfaces for months, and use all animal life as a vector.
- Amid the crisis, the United States quickly fell into disarray. Over time, the social contracts between citizens and government transformed, dissolved, and reformed as five distinct societies.
- Our speculative designs focus roughly 50 years into the future.
To begin building these societies we had a series of long discussions regarding our own experiences with the virus, reactions we’ve observed from others living in the States, and our relationships to these viewpoints. Reactions we identified ranged from social darwinist market worship to apocalyptic eco-anxiety. Each of the divided “states” interrogates one or more of these viewpoints, by putting a new spin on them and/or pushing them to an even further extreme.
For more information on the Unitary Republic of America, please see this post by collaborator, Katherine Yang:
For more information on the Federated States of Reagan, please see this post by collaborator, Jose Guaraco:
For more information on the Republic of Cascadia and Hawaii, please see this post by collaborator, Alec Fisher:
For more information on the Kingdoms, please see this post by collaborator, Kris Yuan:
3 — The Communes
The Communes are an investigation of the reaction that “COVID-19 is the Earth’s way of getting rid of its virus”. Rather than trying to construct a society based around this logic at face value, which in my opinion is a fairly bleak and anti-human outlook, we decided to move towards something at least more productive. Although far from being without problem or logical error, this is one of our most outwardly utopian societies.
Origin
The people of the Communes stayed with their land during the pandemic, even as others fled or died. They grew disillusioned with the media, seeing it as a tool for propaganda used by the other factions. Only trusting in what was immediately important and tangible to them, namely agriculture, these people destroyed all communication devices. Without contact to the “outside world”, these people base their entire small societies on their relationship to nature (which they see themselves as a part of). They are a large collection of small communities with slightly varying cultures, social make-ups, and awareness of the other divided states. Besides the occasional member who decides to leave their commune to travel to another commune or explore one of the other societies, their people are content to stay with the group unless absolutely necessary. For simplicity’s sake, I will hereby refer to the Communes mostly as one entity and describe their most common features across a few different spheres.
Response to Pandemic
The commune’s worldview stems from a few key assumptions, which lead to one key conclusion:
- The Earth is in a constant flux. Organisms sometimes throw the ecological system out of balance, but the earth always provides counterforces to move the system back towards equilibrium.
- Humans have evolved to a point where we are fully aware of the imbalance we create, but because we have not taken measures to reduce this imbalance it is only natural that the world has responded with such an extreme counterforce (COVID-19).
- The natural imbalance created by humans is largely a side effect of socially constructed hierarchies which create divisive inequality, foster greed, and separate humans from what is tangible.
- Conclusion: Dismantling false human-constructed categories and allowing earth to perform its natural processes are seen as the paths toward a joyful human existence.
The virus is not seen as a punishment enacted by an “angry Earth” (with a capital E), it is simply an equal and opposite force, as natural as lifting a ball up a hill and watching it roll back down. It is the natural result of humans molding the earth to their own desires, rather than working in sustainable cooperation with it. These people have faith that once they allow earth to reset itself back to a comfortable equilibrium, the pandemic will end and humans will be free again to develop as they please (perhaps with more foresight this time).
This also means that the Communes do nothing to prevent the spread of COVID-19. When members of this society die of the virus, it is not the result of sin, bad luck, or poor prevention, it is earth’s natural and necessary way of restoring itself. The bodies of these people are used to fertilize the commune’s soil, sustaining the lives of the other members and helping to bring the earth back to equilibrium.
Their worldview is grounded in an attitude of acceptance rather than judgement, panic, or extreme superstition. They value tangible, life-sustaining objects and resources, and do not concern themselves with socially constructed entities like money, religion, or gender. They only deal in the imaginary and abstract when it is clearly useful (ex: storytelling, art).
Sex & Family
The concept of the nuclear family has been completely abandoned. The communes see their community as one ever changing family. Although children may form a special relationship with their parent(s), it is not uncommon for a child to have many (of what we would consider) “parental” figures. Children are cared for by the entirety of the group.
Similarly, there is no standard of heterosexual monogamy, and it is in fact quite uncommon by our standards. Sexual and romantic relationships can involve any number of individuals, span the entire range of open or exclusiveness, and last for any length of time. Although some choose to enter a more rigid monogamous relationship, it is not particularly common. Throughout a lifetime, a commune member typically re-negotiates the terms of their romantic/sexual relationships many times.
Our contemporary gender and sexual categories are obsolete. All of the language that once made us reliant on them has largely been replaced by individual descriptors (“they wear x clothes”, “they like people with x trait”). Whereas it is nearly impossible for us to view clothing, bodily features, personality traits, etc. through an un-gendered lens, this is becoming the younger commune generation’s normal. Gender-neutral pronouns are also quite common, but even in particular communes where “he/him/his” and “she/her/hers” exist they have undergone rapid semantic change. They are simple relics of the past, as devoid of their pre-COVID meaning as a repurposed television screen or car part.
Law
Their law system follows their notion of “forces and counterforces”, or in our terms, “an eye for an eye”. Past the threshold of what is considered legal, punishments are equal to crimes. All punishments and crimes are decided and enforced by the group.
Production
The Communes are largely agrarian. They are very careful not to produce more than they consume. When they store essential resources, it is only to account for the ebb and flow of the harvest.
Art & Expression
They preserve a few history books (which contain information about why the global economy became unsustainable, how the States became divided). Otherwise, their art tends to favor the ephemeral. Literature has been almost entirely replaced by oral tradition. When people do write (for artistic or, more often, practical purposes), it is done on scrap materials. Popular visual arts favor building with the natural landscape (ex: temporary drawings made in soil), repurposing artificial materials, and re-mixing artifacts of the past (although this is less about reference — as much of popular culture is in the process of being forgotten — and more about using the available materials to play/dream/imagine).
By far, the most popular arts in the communes are performance based: music, dance, theater, spoken word, etc. Specifically, the communes favor group performances. There is little separation between artist and audience, and all people are welcome to participate appropriately. There is also little distinction between “art spaces” and “art objects” from other spaces and objects. One is as likely to find themselves experiencing art at a dinner table as they are in a courtyard. Similarly, art is not given the kind of sacred “aura” that it is sometimes given in our own art world. Performances are treated with the same formality as any other type of conversation. Physical arts are treated the same as any other human or earth made objects (ex: something in the category of “wallpaper” is not inherently better or worse than something in the category of “mural”). This is not because they undervalue art. It is rather that they see all aspects of their life as acts of art, and all these acts of art as essential to their life.
4 — Speculative Objects
The two speculative objects I created to populate the Communes took the form of a children’s book and a song.
Children’s Book
In order to clearly communicate what is important to our societies we decided to focus much of our speculative design work towards how each teaches their children. For the communes I decided to create this in the form of a children’s story. This practice helped me to nail down the specifics of commune text creation and storytelling, some of which have provided above.
The following are excerpts from a fantastical recounting of the commune’s origin story. It imagines pollutant technology and mass media as “monsters” that have outgrown their creators (humans) and now seek to destroy them. The founders of the communes are the few heroes that have “broken from the monster’s spell” and fought back. The text then goes on to explain why the commune’s lifestyle is necessary and good. The first three pages are from somewhere near the beginning of the story, and the last page is from the very end.
The text was constructed using very simple materials I was able to find in my recycling bin including envelopes, newspaper, and sticker backings. The only non-repurposed materials were a Sharpie pen and a small amount of tape. Even though this would serve as an important text for the people of the communes, it is not built to last. Eventually the scroll will break down and this is seen as ok. The importance of the story also has little bearing on the sophistication of its artwork. Although it may be considered amateurish by our standards, it serves its purpose and can be enjoyed as a simple storytelling tool right alongside the riveting embellishments of the storyteller, or joking remarks of an audience member.
Speculative Music
Growing up listening to many kinds of music, I have become fascinated by the ways a musician’s context influences what they create. Throughout the design process, I quickly began to imagine what each of our imagined societies might sound like. With my group, I began to conceive of a speculative concept album which could house songs from across the Divided States. When I began creating speculative objects for the communes, I decided I would create one of the tracks for this album which you can hear below. Before I get into the specifics of producing the Commune’s song, I’ve provided some sources of inspiration below.
Speculative Music — Inspiration
I had recently listened to Music From Saharan Cellphones, a collection of (you guessed it) songs taken from cell phones throughout the Sahara Desert (as well as in cities further South like Abidjan and Bamako). This collection documents some of the most truly “underground” music to be produced in recent memory. The artists featured often created their music under very particular constraints, with home studios, cracked versions of FL studio, and cheap synthesizers. At the time these songs were made they had influence within a true cultural bubble, housed by the cell phones themselves and distributed through peer-to-peer data transfers.
Another source of inspiration came from Delta Blues traditions in the United States. Listening to the only recordings Robert Johnson ever made from 1936–37, one can hear that his tunings are entirely his own. When a reference pitch of a set standard (typically A as 432 or 440 Hz) was not available, Delta Blues and folk musicians often only tuned to match one another’s instruments or their own voice.
Although far from outsider artists, the vocal group Roomful of Teeth also served as a model for musical nonconformity. The project was founded with a mission to expand the sonic palette typically heard in so-called “Western” choral music, which is defined by tall vowels and seamless blend. As vocal traditions from Belgium to Mongolia to Death Metal prove, the human voice is capable of so much more. By incorporating these traditions into their work, groups like Roomful of Teeth redefine what the classical music community deems as beautiful, interesting, and worthy of study.
Especially because the people of the Communes see themselves as one with their environment, I was also very curious about the relationship between musicians and the natural soundscapes they inhabit. While most of the music we may be familiar with is directly inspired by a lineage of music which preceded it, inspiration sometimes comes from less conventional places. One relevant example of this is the American country blues performer and harmonica wizard DeFord Bailey. He began playing the harmonica when he was a child, and learned to mimic the sounds of his surroundings most notably trains, foxes, and farm animals. His techniques would redefine harmonica music forever. Some historians speculate that much of his learning took place in isolation, during a year where he was confined to his bed with polio.
Speculative Music — Process
To create the concept album it first needed, well, a concept! The backstory of the album would be very similar to that of Music From Saharan Cellphones which I described above. A member of the Communes grows up to be an avid musician and becomes curious about what music sounds like in the rest of what was the US. After discovering a field recorder in an abandoned library, curiosity gets the better of them and they leave the Commune to document the music of the Divided States. The first track of this album is a recording of a Commune musical performance.
I synthesized my notes on the ethos of Commune art into 5 short bullet points that would guide my process as I put the song together:
- Group performances
- Little distinction between artist and audience
- Little distinction between “art spaces” and other spaces
- Art doesn’t have a sacred “aura” or rigid formality. Performance and conversation are the same thing.
- All aspects of life are acts of art, and all acts of art are essential to life.
I then began to translate these ethos, along with my other understanding of the Communes, into specific rules:
- No electronic sounds
- The song should include many instrumental and vocal parts, performed with varying complexity and precision, to simulate many people of various skill levels participating.
- Complex harmonies are valued, as they demonstrate many people coming together to create something they could not on their own.
- Vocal lines can be sung with any number of atypical articulations (nasal-heavy vowels, breath-heavy shouting, weak falsetto, etc.)
- Instruments can be played in any number of atypical ways (a guitar melody limited to one string, beginning a note on the didgeridoo with an excess of air, etc.)
- The song should include many instruments that might otherwise not be found together. A jaw harp is no less of a “serious” instrument than a guitar or didgeridoo.
- Because the commune’s music exists within a cultural bubble, any voice(s) or tunable instrument(s) must be pitched to match any un-tunable instrument(s) (in this case, the didgeridoo) even if that un-tunable instrument would be considered sharp or flat by some other’s standard.
- The music should not have a strictly defined start and end. The natural soundscape (wind, trees, birds, moving water, etc.) is part of the music, and the music is part of the natural soundscape. When the Commune members perform, they are simply contributing to a song that has always existed, and continues to exist even after they are silent.
To create the illusion of the track being a field recording, I took stereo recordings of the natural sounds in my backyard (being sure to pause when cars drove by) using a Zoom H4n field recorder. I then recorded everything else as mono tracks in a sound treated space (my closet). For mixing, I only altered volume and panning.
Collaborators:
- Alec Fisher (Republic of Cascadia & Hawaii)
- Jose Guaraco (Federated States of Reagan)
- Katherine Yang (Unitary Republic of America)
- Kris Yuan (The Kingdoms)
References
- Music from Saharan Cellphones, vol. 1. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://sahelsounds.bandcamp.com/album/music-from-saharan-cellphones
- Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. S.l.: MIT.
- McCall, M., Rumble, J., Gill, V., & Kingsbury, P. (Eds.). (n.d.). DeFord Bailey. Retrieved from https://countrymusichalloffame.org/artist/deford-bailey/
- Roomful of Teeth. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.roomfulofteeth.org/roomful
- Young, R., & Kirkley, C. (2013, February 25). Mali Music Culture Defined By The Cellphone. Retrieved from https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2013/02/25/mali-cellphone-music
