I think that the reductive, nudge-and-giggle Factory-esque humor may come from a kind of gooiness we have about the future, or the insertion of ironic concepts into serious discussions. Dunne and Raby’s set up a category of humor that dovetails with the inherent uncertainty in our future – that of the complex satire, in which the joke is tinged with a little bit of confusion and critical subjectivity. And that’s totally fair, because the activities were funny, or at least I thought so – making people sit on a reclined massage table face down with a hole in the middle to palpating their abdomens for radiation damage, for example. I was thinking about the legitimacy of things like the Extrapolation Factory experiments in terms of giving practitioners and participants an authentic experience of dealing with imagined futuristic events? The Alternative Unknowns audience kind of smirked their way through the activities – there was an atmosphere of nudging and “can you believe this” there was a conspiracy of amusement. “Dwayne Harris – You Left Me For Your Anthropomorphic Blender. “No Unauthorized Carbon Dumping” “All Methane Cubes Must Be Tagged.” “Stacey had sex with a Gamma Ray Compositor and it wasn’t even good” + a proposed futuristic meme of unacceptability, adapted from the character the Earl of Lemongrab from the animated show Adventure Time. There’s a kind of ironic grimness in the fact that a hamper which tells you not to deposit un-recyclable organs of millennials is also the site of absurdist personal declarations. My biohazard hamper was intended to use the through-line metaphor of a literal dumpster for biological and chemical waste as a symbolic dumping ground for sexual impropriety in the public, as well as to comment on the presumed apathy of some segment of the population even in a future where climate change was a pressing, if not dystopic, concern. For my making-object this week, I was trying to come up with an idea of a futuristic item that was invaded by memetics and low-cultural vandalism that was nevertheless funny.

Grobot typing fingers meme