Future Soup – A Collection of Orkney Futures

MORAG MACINNES sat down over lunch with Alistair Peebles and Dr Laura Watts to chew over a new handbook that attempts to imagine futures for Orkney

MORAG MACINNES: Can you give me the details, about the handbook?

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: It’s a 56-page soft cover booklet which contains 49 pieces of writing by a variety of writers, including Robert Rendall, submitted by invitation, selected on the basis of the idea that they were composing ideas about Orkney’s future.

It’s been produced in an edition of a thousand, printed by the Orcadian, assisted by a grant from HI~Arts and the Scottish Arts Council, who were both very supportive. It’s edited by Laura and myself, and published by Brae Editions at £7.50.

Orkney Futures (photo - Alistair Peebles)

MORAG MACINNES: So – how did it all start? You might have to tighten the top of that salt cellar a bit.

LAURA WATTS: You do that and I’ll talk…. It started as a conversation between Alistair and me… we discovered that we shared a feeling about how landscape in Orkney makes such a difference to the way you imagine the possibilities for the future, and for me that ties in with the research project I’m doing at Lancaster Univeristy – Relocating Innovation.

Because it’s hugely different living in Orkney and imagining the future and living somewhere like the Thames valley. What strikes me as important is what I call the temporality of the landscape – the time depth – the sense of the long history of technology here, from the Neolithic to Scapa Flow, the landscape is very dynamic…. I’m interested in how you think differently about new technology, in different places – so for me this is the place to be.

MORAG MCACINNES: But you are also a poet – it seems to me the interaction between the two of you has something to do with the love of words and the dialogue. Alistair, did it come from the photography? The words? What?

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: This is lovely soup… I’m sure that was part of it…. Certainly the part that led to the idea of publishing a book collaboratively. My side of it originated not so much in the studio as in Porteous Brae Gallery – Laura coming in and visiting and being immediately attuned to what was going on.

LAURA WATTS: For me one of the real moments was looking at the photography work you had done, Alistair – I think you have this extraordinary eye for Orkney. Most images of Orkney have a real nostalgia or romance attached to them. I find your work poignant, because it’s a working landscape.

Aquamarine Power's Oyster installed at EMEC's test site north of Stromness at a place called Billia Croo (photo - Alistair Peebles)

MORAG MACINNES: It’s about time, too, isn’t it? Alistair photographs time a lot, and that’s what we’re thinking about here, isn’t it? About what we did in the past and what on earth we are going to do with the future?

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: I was minded to add to Laura’s involvement with Orkney, which had largely been to do with archaeology and the renewables, broadening the contacts…

MORAG MACINNESS: I forgot, I’ve got croutons. Well, it’s old bread really.

ALISTAIR MACINNES: … that she was able to draw upon. For example we went out – you were my camera assistant and I was doing a project with Orkney meat – so we were producing an image that represented the vitality of the Orkney farming community, and that grew into an idea about the book, taking landscape and opinions and just going with it.

MORAG MACINNES: And do you think this is a crucial time for Orkney? I mean is there a reason that this handbook is in its moment?

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: I had been thinking about a publication connected to the celebration of the Year of Island Cultures – but that overlapped with the notion of investigating Orkney. This is an interesting time – one of the things I was trying to do in Porteous Brae Gallery was try to explore the way the landscape is an issue of politics, as much as topography.

MORAG MACINNES: I think there’s no question the Brae Gallery changed the way people look at things.

LAURA WATTS: For me there was a very practical element to the book. Last year I was here for five months as an anthropologist, looking at how Orkney futures are imagined and how that’s different to other places around the world – Silicon Valley, or Hungary – so many people have so much invested in making futures happen here.

I write creatively as well as academically, I don’t feel there’s such a separation between the two, and during those months I’ve written a lot of poetry and prose, inspired by what I was hearing. It is about finding a way to bring all these diverse voices together.

When people consider places where the future is determined, they often think: Silicon Valley or Milan, but, actually, it’s where people have to adapt to their environment, like here

There is no single future out there and the booklet, in a gentle, in a modest way, is saying – look, there’s all these approaches ! No one has any more important place than anyone else – but there’s tensions , and relationships, and resonances. The book draws together my relationship with the research, the people and the landscape.

Aquamarine Power's Oyster installed at EMEC's test site north of Stromness at a place called Billia Croo (photo - Alistair Peebles)

MORAG MACINNES: Do you think it’s important that people have a picture of the future? I mean, I think it is (there’s Westray water biscuits and Orkney cheese coming) because if you haven’t thought ahead you’re scuppered –

LAURA WATTS: I write sci-fi, I write poetry, I write fiction, the future is embedded in everything I do… if you can’t imagine the future differently from other people, how can it possibly happen differently? It’s important to pay attention to the future. Not only because we all have responsibility – what we do will affect the conditions of possibility for what the future might be – but because our imagination informs what we do and affects the landscape – it’s not stuck in the mind, it’s part of the body as well.

MORAG MACINNES: Do you think the future is about small communities? We may have a template here for avoiding the global one-fix solution.

LAURA WATTS: I often remind people that there only are small communities – even if you’re working for a big multi-national corporation you’re only part of a small department… but communities like Orkney have a very deep commitment to the place.You don’t accidentally end up living in Orkney, so that means people have a different level of commitment to it.

There are histories here that you might not get in other types of communities. When people come to Orkney, folk wait two winters to see if they’ll stay, and if you stay your two winters with your four hours of daylight in this extraordinary tempestuous landscape, then there is enormous support from people. Orkney doesn’t breed competition, it breeds collaboration.

MORAG MACINNES: Any small community on the edge is going to be like that… cutting edge technology actually has to happen in a place where things are quite extreme perhaps?

LAURA WATTS: My phrase is that Orkney is a place that’s at the edge and on the edge… of the future and the geographic periphery – when people consider places where the future is determined, they often think: Silicon Valley or Milan, but, actually, it’s where people have to adapt to their environment, like here. Use what’s around them. There’s a tinkering mentality. You don’t have to be reliant on what’s come over on the boat!

MORAG MACINNES: In terms of how people are writing about the future – how’s that happening here? It seems to me you are encouraging folk to think out of the box?

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: I’m constitutionally a complete improviser – I don’t think that much about the future.

Archaeological excavation at the Ness of Brodgar (photo - Alistair Peebles)

MORAG MACINNES: You can’t say that, that destroys the whole point ! We’re putting coffee or tea on in a minute…

LAURA WATTS: Improvising is all about the future, though.

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: Yes, and I think there are communities and communities, and the less impervious the boundaries are the better.

LAURA WATTS: That’s why we wanted to include voices in the booklet who had never visited Orkney – the kind of futures that are made here are also bound up with the way other people imagine Orkney.

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: This is undoubtedly a small community and it’s defined by geography – and you can learn about how to live in a small community through the book. There’s a variety of tendencies in the contributions harking back to values from the past, which they would hope to see substantiated in the future, and there are other versions which are much more frontier. A lot of them are in a continuum.

MORAG MACINNES: Scottish literature is often about harking back, about past glories . Trying to think the future seems a bit good and gobsmacking.

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: There’s a contribution called New Futurism and the death of nostalgia…

MORAG MACINNES: There you go then! Laura brought these truffle things,

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: There are some highly esteemed professional writers in here, there are people who have never written at all, or not in this way since they were at school, and I think that’s a great achievement.

LAURA WATTS: We used a renga way of selecting the pieces.

MORAG MACINNES: Oh, how? I know renga is big here and there’s a group making great poetry.

LAURA WATTS: That was a moment of genius by Alistair. What could have been this incredibly fraught editorial process turned into a real pleasure – it was never intended to be a competition – the pieces were in there not because of the quality of the writing but because of the ideas and the heart, so we needed a shape. We set aside a day to essentially renga the book.

Flags have recently come into use to deter geese from grazing on young grass during the winter (photo - Alistair Peebles)

MORAG MACINNES: So that would be linking and shifting?

LAURA WATTS: We started off with a series of themes, the feel of a structure, and that gave us a base, a framework.

MORAG MACINNES: It’ll click in a couple of minutes… I should get decent equipment, eh, talk about innovation… I’ll boil the kettle again.

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: I have to say it’s been an extraordinary process. The heart of the book is this instinct that we have about the relationship between futures and landscapes.

MORAG MACINNES: Is there is another thing which is going on here which is about renga physics?

(crazy laughter)

MORAG MACINNES: Well, it’s about flux and movement.

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: Both of us are completely indefatigable. There’s a sense of never giving up until you get to the place… don’t forget the cake.

MORAG MACINNES: Oh, your cake! Here it is, sorry about the attendant dog…

LAURA WATTS: And then helping at the excavation at the Ring of Brodgar was important to me.

MORAG MACINNES: Wow – real cake.

LAURA WATTS: Heritage is for me about a memory of the past in the present – no thank you – so it’s always going to be different over time. Heritage has this immense responsibility. To think what kind of futures are remembered – this is a version of the past that we want to send on into the future.

MORAG MACINNES: That’s not how people here see heritage. Heritage is flies in aspic.

LAURA WATTS: They’re creating the past and deciding what kind of heritage they want to send into the future, and they’re aware of the responsibility they have. We have all these futures which are being made around us.

In 2004 Burray windmill was Scotland's first commercial scale grid connected turbine under local ownership (photo - Alistair Peebles)

MORAG MACINNES: So in fact my definition of heritage is wrong, I’m thinking of that in a very negative kind of way.

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: I don’t know where this is going but I’m drawing a parallel with literary heritage, which continues over the centuries and is used and plundered – maybe that’s heritage? Off the top of my head? Different from science, which is more linear?

LAURA WATTS: Scientific knowledge doesn’t pop out of nowhere. There’s huge amounts of debates about how you make the world, and make knowledge– science is hard work.

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: The same’s true of writing. Eliot’s thing – a great writer is one who creates the conditions by which he’s judged. So in relation to the heritage analogy the archaeologists are creating the interpretation of the heritage.

LAURA WATTS: And there are no hard facts, there are only interpretations of the evidence… somebody said to me – farming is a futures way of living, because farmers are attentive to the land.

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: I think not just farming, but all business, is future orientated. The future is how you make it possible to stay in business… it’s about being able to stay on your feet.

LAURA WATTS: I found doing research in industry there was a real lack of memory. I was doing work in the Mobiles Telecom industry, and there wasn’t an awareness of the past, old ideas just got repeated as new ones. All industries have heritage, so the answer for me was to have lots more storytelling so these memories get passed on.

Harray Loch with windmills on Burgar Hill (photo - Alistair Peebles)

MORAG MACINNES: Is it about people? Or technology?

LAURA WATTS: Well, you can’t separate them. People do what we’re doing now, sitting around telling stories with soup, you have to keep passing the stories on.

MORAG MACINNES: So the future is actually about reclaiming a lot of things in the past?

LAURA WATTS: Remembering what’s done and acknowledging it. You don’t have to leave the past behind. There’s a French philospher, Michel Serres, who says, when you drive a car, you’re basically weaving time – you’ve got wheels which are essentially Neolithic, you’ve got the engine, which is Victorian, and the computer on board – technological progress isn’t linear. We have a much richer heritage than that.

MORAG MACINNES: That actually dovetails completely with literature, doesn’t it!

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: Them wheels were made in Dickens’ time… and in George Mackay Brown’s case the Vikings invented the style. One of the categories of being human is constant forgetting – take consumerism – you never remember how bad things were. People are focused on having, and that having will turn them into better people.

MORAG MACINNES: You’re talking about reclaiming?

LAURA WATTS: There should be more attention paid to science fiction – it s
ts on its own as a genre, but yet – Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin – that’s fiction that pays attention to the future and alters the way we think about it. The effect of science fiction in the Telecoms industry for e
ample – if it hadn’t been for Captain Kirk and his Star Trek communicator – maybe no mobile phones that flip open!

Science fiction has this extraordinary effect – if you’ve seen it in a film or read it in a book, then people believe that somehow it’ll come to pass, and that puts an enormous responsibility on people who write about futures. The booklet is a handbook of future fictions.

MORAG MACINNES: When you invited contributions, how many took on board it was going to be a futures thing?

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: Well, what would the genre have been? There were a number of contributions bringing values, ideas, from the past.

LAURA WATTS: Some of them emphasised the relationship we have with the future.

MORAG MACINNES: I just wonder, if people imagine the future, that it’s always going to be a doomsday scenario.

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: Well, there’s always a disaster…

MORAG MACINNES: It’s the curse of the modern.

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: It’s not a modern thing – at the end of the first millennium they were certain that was it. There’s a book by Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, which is about this, in relation to literary texts, which says it’s a constant part of humanity.

MORAG MACINNES: What I think you are doing is opening up a sense of new energy (in both senses!).

ALISTAIR PEEBLES: Seamus Heaney, in the introduction, writes about arriving in Orkney. He had to write a poem for Amnesty, for Human Rights Day, and he ‘envisaged a fictional Republic of conscience… a place of clear physical and moral weather, a place where we might be able to conceive of a better spiritual and ecological destiny for our species. So Orkney’s future, as far as I’m concerned, is to maintain itself, and trust itself, as a locus of ongoing possibility.’

MORAG MACINNES: Many thanks… the weather’s improving I think – I can just see Scotland.

© Morag MacInnes, 2009