Laurent Kloetzer's blog

Category: writing

  • Imagination as the recomposition of reality

    Image by irenhorrors on deviantArt.

    (this post is the sequel of that one, please read it before to get the context)

    The house with the chicken feet is an image associated with Russian fairy tales and the witch Baba Yaga. It’s an image I really like, and my co-author and I used it in one of our fantasy novels (it’s the house of the faceless witch). We took it from the stories of Fritz Leiber, who took it from Russian fairy tales, or perhaps from the prologue to Ruslan and Ludmila, by Pushkin.
    Which brings us back to Russia, the home of Lev Vygotsky, one of the great thinkers in psychology and one of the great theoretical resources of L.L. Kloetzer’s other L. (aside: Vygotsky is a kind of rock-star scientist, who took advantage of the Bolshevik revolution to think and innovate in many fields and died tragically at the age of 37, at the start of Stalinism).

    Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky


    Vygotsky was interested in imagination as a relation to experience. (Please beware: Laurent is the one doing the explaining here – anything that isn’t true is my own). The house with the chicken feet (which he cites as an example) illustrates the fact that our imagination works by recombining images from reality. Our capacity for imagination, he says, depends on our experiences.

    But these experiences don’t have to be direct (having seen a hut, a chicken, and pasted them together). They can also be based on experiences passed on by culture, the imaginations of others (Fritz Leiber’s or Russian storytellers), and in this way, imagination is based on experience, which is based… on imagination. But an imagination crystallised in a cultural product.

    Our small study enabled us to look at the ‘how’ of this process of composing experience in an exercise in imagining the future. By focusing on a particular exercise (imagining a future within a given timeframe, about a given place), we were able to work on a collection of similar narratives dealing with the same imaginative constraints.
    From our corpus of 88 positive and 88 negative narratives, we found recombining elements of biographical origin, fictional elements and elements linked to the ZeitGeist, current events, illustrating Vygotsky’s theory on the different experiential sources of imagination: the person’s historical experience, immediate experience and cultural experiences.
    Cool, isn’t it?

    Of course, our audience is very small – students from a small, wealthy country are not representative of anything other than themselves – but our process, our ‘telescope to the future’, enabled us to illustrate in a vivid way the very social, anchored and marvellous way in which our imagination works.
    In another article, I could talk about the difficulties of imagining a positive future.

    Another house with chicken feet, illustration of an old edition of Ruslan & Ludmila

  • Publishing a text for a contemporary art exhibition

    One of the advantages of having already published in a field is that you may receive interesting offers. For example, creating a science fiction short story for a book associated with a contemporary art exhibition.

    The MUDAC (Musée cantonal de design et d’arts appliqués contemporains) is one of Lausanne’s cultural institutions. It used to be housed in a big house next to the cathedral, but for the past few years it has settled in a rather attractive concrete cube on the concrete-concrete site of Platforme 10, just next to themain station.

    This year the museum is hosting the Solar Biennial, an exhibition organised as part of the Solar Movement, an initiative to promote the artistic and design aspects of solar-related technologies. As the MUDAC has a small publishing department, the curators proposed to accompany the exhibition with the publication of a collection of science fiction short stories by international authors on the theme of solar energy and the sun. As this collection was coordinated by the publisher La Volte, my co-author and I were asked to submit a text.

    The request was for a text about a positive future, linked to the theme of the sun. SF writers are often asked to write about happy futures in these complicated times, because the future we’re facing isn’t very bright. It’s not an easy exercise: it’s easier to talk about our fears and what scares us.

    The result of our work is a text entitled ‘Le champ de la Mi-été’, which is now in a book alongside prestigious neighbours such as Nnedi Okorafor, luvan, Sabrina Calvo, Michael Roch… Our participation in this collection also enabled us to be invited to the opening of the exhibition.

    An exhibition opening in the Museum of Contemporary Art of the fourth largest city in Switzerland (a small city by European standards) is not exactly my usual milieu. So who comes? Basically people from the cultural bourgeoisie. Artists of all kinds, university professors, quite a few young, fluid people and some well-dressed older ones. I’d put on my best hat.

    The opening began with a talk by the Dutch women behind the Solar Biennale, which had already taken place in Rotterdam. The speech was in international English, and as I was quite far behind, I didn’t understand a word of it.

    Then Scott Longfellow (curator of the exhibition with Rafaël Santianez) gave four talks in French by people involved in the exhibition.

    First of all, Professor Christophe Ballif from EPFL, a specialist in solar panels at the Neuchâtel Institute of Microtechnology. He’s a huge fan of solar panel technology. He says that we’ll be able to produce just about all the energy humanity needs with this technology, that China is way ahead in this field, and that we’ll find the materials we need to do it. (I’m summarising with a hammer)

    Then there’s the great solar lab duo https://mudac.ch/designers/solar-lab/ / Studio Lemercier, whose exhibition showcases their DIY solar projects and their desire to create imaginary worlds that are at once technical, poetic and beautiful, spurred on by the opening of the world’s largest open-cast brown coal mine, in Germany, not far from where they live.

    Then there was Professor Marilyne Andersen from the EPFL again (this institution is everywhere in Switzerland) https://people.epfl.ch/marilyne.andersen?lang=en who talked about those receptors at the back of the eye that aren’t used to see, but just to adjust our circadian rhythms, and about the fact that, indoors in the city, we had 100 times less light than outdoors (even if the brain is good at making us believe the opposite). All this is to introduce the cool installation in the exhibition: the Cantonal Office of Daylight, a fictional administration that ensures that everyone has access to the daylight they need.

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    And finally, the dancer Rocio Berenguer https://rocioberenguer.com/info.php who talked about interspecies dance (with weeds) and issued a joyous bad weeds manifesto (you can see her/their work on video in the exhibition).

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    And finally, the exhibition opens.

    It’s very tech/design oriented, with a shift towards the imaginary and SF.

    Some of the highlights:

    • a time capsule that allows plants to travel into the future (it artificially creates the conditions for plants to grow where the glaciers have retreated – there are plants inside);
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    • a sun-yurt lounge where you can read the book of SF short stories published to coincide with the exhibition
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    • a screening of a film about giant-SF-machines, in which an artist imagines the huge machines that will be used to decarbonise the atmosphere;
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    • the interior of a house where a designer has removed everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary (I forgot to take the photo), resulting in an über-Japanese interior;
    • full of solar crafts, HEAD creations, magazine covers on the theme of the sun, and an open skylight in the ceiling so that, yeah, the sun can come into this room.
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    Afterwards, there was a lot of official blah-blah, followed by plenty of red and white wine and boxer beer, and apple juice for those of you in a sober period. And then I left, because it had been a long day.

    End of transmissions, come and visit the exhibition if you get the chance, it’s well worth it!

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  • Instant Futures

    I’ve been publishing fiction professionally (that means getting paid for it) since 1997. But one of the informal goals I’ve set myself as an author is to try to publish texts in as wide a variety of media as possible. For example, I’ve published a role-playing scenario and two articles in the now defunct magazine Casus Belli, written a children’s text for Bayard Presse… and co-signed a scientific article this January.
    Like all self-respecting articles, it has a super duper long title:

    Instant Futures: an experimental study of the imagination of alternative near futures thanks to science fiction

    The title of the journal is Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science and, unlike Casus Belli, I don’t regularly read it. But the other L. of L.L.Kloetzer, the one who does scientific research, knows it well.
    In this paper, we describe research carried out over the last five years during the Environmental Psychology course taught by L.K. (the other one) at the University of Neuchâtel. In this course, the teacher uses protokools from Zanzibar [fr] to get students thinking about the future.

    With the permission of the people involved, we studied the stories produced, which enabled us 1) to link the construction of the stories with the mechanisms of imagination described by Lev Vygotski, the coolest and most Marxist of psychology researchers.

    The protokool used is a ‘classic’ that we have played on many occasions with our zanzi-friends.

    In the first phase, people are asked to describe a familiar place in a future that they do not want to happen.


    In the second phase, they were asked to describe the same place in a future they thought desirable.


    We then asked ourselves what imaginary resources, whether personal, current affairs or fictional, were mobilised to construct these ‘snapshots of the future’ (I didn’t say it, but the students had 10 minutes each time to draw up their texts).

    To focus on fictional resources, we asked ourselves whether the stories produced in 1.1 were more ‘Wall-E’ (dead world, piles of rubbish), more ‘Mad Max’ (looters and violence), more ‘The Road’ (nuclear or climatic apocalypse), more ‘Brave New World’, and so on.
    Or if the stories produced in 1.2 (positive) were more like ‘Green World’ (that’s what I call the current minimalist ecological ideal: recycling, permaculture, short cycles, etc.), more like ‘Snow White’ (we live happily in the forest with the animals), more like ‘Nausicaa’ (hard-working, isolated country communities with a bit of tech), more like ‘Star Trek’ (super tech helps us overcome problems)…

    It was I (LK) who named the fictional categories, throw me some stones if you find them silly 😅.
    I’ll comment on the results of the study in a future post, but if you’re impatient, you can read the paper!