New Rousseau Machine (Kyoto Mounting Edition)

The same votes can produce different forms of the collective will.

New Rousseau Machine (Kyoto Mounting Edition) is a wall-based reconfiguration of New Rousseau Machine, adapted to a different exhibition space.

New Rousseau Machine processes the same set of voting data through four aggregation rules: direct voting by simple plurality, the Borda count, representative democracy, and liquid democracy. Change the aggregation rule, and the same votes produce a different result. Each outcome is correctly calculated according to its prescribed rule, yet each selects a different collective will and a different world-line.

This is not a question of agitation or electoral fraud distorting a vote. Even when every participant votes of their own accord and every ballot is counted accurately, the outcome changes according to the aggregation technology employed. Once accepted as the will of a group through a legitimate procedure, the decision functions as a social contract that binds its members and cannot easily be reversed.

The original New Rousseau Machine presented three questions concerning the city’s fundamental direction, demographic composition, and allocation of its budget, each with three possible options. The resulting twenty-seven world-lines—and the different outcomes selected by the four aggregation rules—were constructed across a temporary wall more than five metres wide as a network of screws and differently coloured construction strings.

For its presentation in the 2021 exhibition The Year 2121: Futures In-Sight at 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, the same voting data and results were reduced and reconfigured within a 910-millimetre square to suit the conditions of the exhibition space. With the collaboration of Inoue Kogado, a Kyoto mounting studio, the support was finished with washi, upon which screws and construction strings trace the world-lines selected by the four aggregation rules. The voting data and results remain unchanged; only their scale and mode of presentation differ.

The Year 2121: Futures In-Sight was conceived not to predict a single world one hundred years into the future, but to consider futures in the plural. New Rousseau Machine (Kyoto Mounting Edition) visualises how multiple futures can emerge from the preferences of the same group—and how the future that becomes reality may depend upon an aggregation technology we use without even noticing it.