June 2012
44 posts
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May 2012
69 posts
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“I see retrofuturism as a conservative way of coming to terms with the present....”
– Enthusiasms
“One of the trickier aspects of this formulation of foresight is the need to keep...”
– Open the Future: The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be
“In Hapax Phaenomena and other projects such as Google Earth Sites, you refer to...”
– Rhizome | Artist Profile: Clement Valla
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“I’ve been a big believer in historical pendulum swings—American sociopolitical...”
– You Say You Want a Devolution? | Style | Vanity Fair
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“Ironically, new technology has reinforced the nostalgic cultural gaze: now that...”
– You Say You Want a Devolution? | Style | Vanity Fair
“That Fuller’s own projects remain for us to see in an “unrealized” state,...”
– The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area - Architecture - Domus (via iamdanw)
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A digital artefact has no physical characteristics, therefore cannot be dated independently of its claims as to the time when it was created or posted. What follows – along the lines of what Paolo Cherchi-Usai has written about the moving image, and of one of the main corollaries of the contention that we live in a ‘post-photographic era’ – is that a digital artefact cannot be regarded as a...
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How to be a Retronaut
There is no era in poster-art that won’t get cleverly reinvented as alternative past or present. There is no worldwide current event that won’t make Hitler angry, or that cannot be represented as a series of status updates on Facebook. Endless film prequels, the current vogue for period television drama, vintage tastes in fashion and the retromania in pop music described by Simon Reynolds are all...
ORBIS - The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of... →
ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity. Taking account of seasonal...
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“My hypothesis is that this work of art would not have materialised without...”
– Post-digital art. The projection of technology as a way of seeing. | Etienne Deleflie on Art and Technology
The Eagle Has Crashed (1966) →
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“The result will be a state of constant psychological warfare between the present...”
– Welcome to the Future Nauseous
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The Pink Bathroom: Virtual and Physical... →
Space is becoming as malleable and fluid as photographic images. We can know everything now. Everything from everywhere at anytime. The notion of the mysterious or the unknown is fast becoming a nostalgia. While the romantic may lament the loss of the unknown, the detective celebrates it, for it is his job to discover the unknown and reveal the latent messages encoded in space.
Welcome to the Future Nauseous →
The result will be a world population with a large majority of people on the edge of madness, somehow functioning in a haze where past, present and future form a chaotic soup (have you checked out your Facebook feed lately) of drunken perspective shifts.
This is already starting to happen. Instead of a newspaper feeding us daily doses of a shared Field, we get a nauseating mix of news from...
“Sure, we can all see the small clues all around us: cellphones, laptops,...”
– Welcome to the Future Nauseous
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“I want to give it a name, and at this point I’m calling it Network Realism....”
– Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms of Fiction | booktwo.org
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“The real kicker, however, is time. Zero History is happening right now. It’s as...”
– Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms of Fiction | booktwo.org
The New Communism: Resurrecting the Utopian... →
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“Networks that are resilient on their own become fragile and prone to...”
– Networked Networks Are Prone to Epic Failure
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What is the Future of Network Culture? →
In the case of atemporality, the most pernicious parts are our inability to map ourselves historically in order to take stock of our condition and the lack of alternative temporalities together with the possibility of rupture.
Declaration on the Notion of ‘The Future’ →
5 The INS rejects the Enlightenment’s version of time: of time as progress, a line growing stronger and clearer as it runs from past to Future. This version is tied into a narrative of transcendence: in the Hegelian system, of Aufhebung, in which thought and matter ascend to the realm of spirit as the projects of philosophy and art perfect themselves. Against this totalizing (we would say,...
“And down the road, on the Mall itself, the BRITISH COUNCIL have put up an...”
– INTERNET FRIDGE / REAL-TIME TUBE DATA | Flickr - Photo Sharing! @stml
“As the arc of innovation becomes a branching, radical network rather than a...”
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“an environment where cyclical and forward-moving time on one hand and the...”
– Free
Free →
Al Gore envisioned networked technology as the “information superhighway,” tempted by the symbolic power of the road. In the analysis of Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, the road’s properties of openness and motion make it a common literary setting for encounters among individuals of diverse backgrounds. Time’s forward movement, doubled by the road’s linear shape, is transfused into social...
Access Main Computer File →
“Although they’re now simply known as the Anaheim Ducks, Walt Disney Co....”
– 11 Actual Products Inspired By Films And TV | Slideshows
Watch
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The Trouble with Timelines →
After Priestley, the form of the timeline caught on. In addition to its visual effectiveness, the timeline amplified conceptions of historical progress that were becoming popular at the time. The relationship was mutually reinforcing. As Priestley himself suggests, the timeline filled in as a kind of fantasized visual referent for an object without material substance. In its simplest form, it...
“the object of any of our senses, and no image can properly be made of it, yet...”
– CABINET // The Trouble with Timelines Jason Priestley
Artificial Ape Man: How Technology Created Humans →
So you are saying that technology came before humans?
The archaeological record shows chipped stone tool technologies earlier than 2.5 million years ago. That’s the smoking gun. The oldest fossil specimen of the genus Homo is at most 2.2 million years old. That’s a gap of more than 300,000 years – more than the total length of time that Homo sapiens has been on the planet. This suggests that...
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“‘Modern’ has become almost an insult, which is why I am trying to dust it down...”
– Nicolas Bourriaud Frieze Magazine | Archive | Tate Triennial 2009
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TM Both The Radicant and the Tate Triennial arrive at a moment of global economic crisis. Is this significant to your construction of ‘altermodern’?
NB The term ‘Postmodern’ first appeared around the time of the 1973 oil crisis, an event that caused the world to realize for the first time that our energy reserves were limited – i.e., it put an end to the idea of superabundance, infinite progress and the Modernist idea of culture as a projection into the future. The oil crisis represents for me the ‘primordial moment’ of Postmodernism. Since then the economy has been disconnected from natural resources and reoriented towards an immaterial ‘financialization’, whose limits we clearly see now, with the partial collapse of the system. While the economy was severing its ties with concrete geography, culture was becoming divorced from history as a coherent scenario. Postmodernism was the story of this disconnection, leading to a reified conception of ‘origins’. What I call ‘altermodern’ is the narrative of our reconnection with both, through a new set of parameters linked to globalization - instantaneity, availability, displacements …
TM Perhaps this is a very British question, but how does class fit into your formulation of ‘altermodernity’?
NB One could say that the Postmodernist period has seen the notion of ‘class’ erased as a historical subject and replaced by a myriad of ethnic, cultural, social or sexual communities. None of those groups in itself represents a threat to the ruling establishment, and the Postmodern period has seen a move from political to socio-cultural struggles. But at this political level the gathering of those communities into a ‘multitude’, as Michael Hardt and Toni Negri termed it, finally crystallized into the ‘alterglobalization’ movement, a cluster of intertwined struggles that, although deprived of any totalizing content, are coherent between one another. Modernism was preoccupied by the way history could be achieved according to prescribed scenarios. Again, the big Postmodern question was ‘Where are you coming from?’, which was the basis of its post-colonial, essentialist and post-political discourse. A new question arises today - ‘Where are we going to?’ We know that we can only reach this destination, wherever it is, by wandering. Real social divisions are economic. The modern gesture par excellence is the uprooting, the exodus – which is why I consider queer theory as more ‘altermodern’ than Postmodern.
TM How would you characterize your vision of space and time? It seems to me that written or spoken language is important to a number of artists in the Triennial. I’m thinking of the work of Nathaniel Mellors, Tris Vonna-Michell, Charles Avery ...
NB In order to understand it, we have to go back to Postmodernism, whose historical task was to level all chronological systems by criticizing the Western one. In our globalized culture time has become a space in itself, and the artists I categorize as ‘altermodern’ are the first to explore this new frontier. So yes, Mellors, Vonna-Michell and Avery are using written or spoken language in their works, in order to compose complex narratives in which time and space merge. I call this compositional mode the ‘journey form’, a ‘trajectorial form’; it includes elements that are absent, past or future, fictional or documentary. It can take the form of an installation connecting with diverse events or places, bringing together the co-ordinates of a unique journey, as a ribbon of signs. Simon Starling and Darren Almond, for example, displace objects in order to unveil their history - they ‘viatorize’ forms (from the Latin viator, ‘traveller’).
“I feel we’re in a time now where people can handle whatever you can throw at...”
– Articles: Maximal Nation | Features | Pitchfork Flylo
Maximal Nation →
The overall effect of pulling from many different phases in the evolution of electronic music technology is a fiesta of retro-futures: as if flashing back simultaneously to all the moments when a bunch of new machines changed the sound of music could somehow redeliver that original shock of the now.
“Eventually the quality of Street View photography will peak and the website will...”
– Free
“Someday we will press a button to rewind and fast-forward through the history of...”
– Free
