Following on from the Concept Store series of exhibitions last year, Arnolfini has launched a new series of exhibitions and projects under the umbrella designation of Futurology. This series will continue Arnolfini’s new project-minded focus for contemporary art exhibitions and projects.

Mariana Castillo Deball, Nobody Was Tomorrow, 2008

Predictive Text:
Representations of the future as a political economy

Utopia has always been a political issue, an unusual destiny for a literary form: yet just as the literary value of the form is subject to permanent doubt, so also its political status structurally ambiguous.[1]

Risk does not mean catastrophe. Risk means the anticipation of catastrophe. Risk exists in a permanent state of virtuality, and become ‘topical’ only to the extent that they are anticipated. Risks are not ‘real’, they are ‘becoming real’. At the moment risks becomes real – for example, in the shape of the breakdown of the market economy – they cease to be risks and become catastrophes. Risks have already moved elsewhere: to the anticipation of terrorist attacks or climate change etc. Risks are always events that are threatening. Without techniques of visualisation, without symbolic forms, without staging, without ‘mediation’ or ‘translation’, risks are nothing at all.[2]

Recently, when telling people that I’ve been curating a series of exhibitions on the subject of the future, people have often automatically assumed that I have some kind of juvenile obsession with flying cars and skin-tight outfits. Granted, the Sci-Fi imaginary is certainly an integral part of the understanding of this notion; science fiction was for a long time the popular catch-all medium for society’s possible futures. Today however, the future is deeply ingrained in the rhetoric of all types of geo-political message; it has become a representational tool – a device used for the purposes of affect, to instil the collective sense that imminent change is required. Through political messages about human induced risks (such as terrorism, the economy, or the ecology debate), constructed scenarios of future conditions are instrumentalised to propagate a sense that immediate action, or occasionally inaction, is required. In any of these debates, and from the perspective of all sides, carefully crafted visions of the future have become the key to the message.

So what do we mean by ‘the future’ here? It is certainly not something that is ultimately intended for us to transgress the present in order to take an imaginary leap in time; rather, it is about the present – an affective machinery that creates a collective sense of self-awareness of the here and now, along with how it might change for the better or the worse. The use of the ‘scenario’ comes directly from academic Futures Studies, which treats predictions of the future as a science, albeit a knowingly inexact one. Scenario thinking is a key part of this. Scenarios are created using various available methodologies for thinking ahead, but most frequently created using a sense of linearity for time. Objectively, they attempt to draw a trajectory using the past as a model to slice through the present into an imagined possibility of something ahead, in this sense the future is conceived of as being a bit like memory in reverse. But it is through the use of the scenario that imagining the future appropriates the classically cinematic or theatrical – the ambition towards the suspension of disbelief.

Literary critic, political theorist and science fiction aficionado Fredric Jameson has sought the points of intersection between cultural production and politics in his volume Archaeologies of the Future (2005). Here, he states that representations of Utopia (and its close neighbour Dystopia) in science fiction has the ‘unusual destiny’ of being a popular cultural form that is also part of a politicised form of rhetoric.[3] Prediction of the future is a science with its foundations in the unknowable; this makes it so malleable that it is open to all kinds of manipulation in response to social dilemmas. Adam Curtis’ renowned BBC documentary series The Power of Nightmares (2004), charted the radical shift that took place within the rhetoric of politicians in the latter half of the 20th Century.[4] This shift moved from the offering of Utopian future possibilities, to their prophesying of dystopian nightmare scenarios from which they could protect the public (controversially, he argues that the threat of such ambiguous forces as radical Islam is largely a myth perpetuated by politicians). This prophesying is intended to unite the public across social boundaries in the creation of a shared ambition to eliminate catastrophe after the failure of the earlier, more utopian ideologies; all the while, using scenario thinking to suggest the possible pitfalls of any radical or alternative re-imaginings of society deemed necessary for the utopian aspiration.

Recently contemporary art, through numerous solo and group exhibitions, has also had a tendency to look at the future. Investigating the future has emerged both in artistic and curatorial practice simultaneously and it is fair to say that it has become a hot topic, reflecting the recurring responsibility of these practices for reflecting and critiquing the socio-political issues of the day. This is not necessarily contrary to the recent thoughts of writer Dieter Roelstraete, who has also highlighted the ‘Historiographic Turn’ in art – the tendency towards history, re-enactment, and revision – as one of the most distinct tendencies of the 2000s.[5] However the ‘pressing obligation’, as he considers it, to explore the future has actually already begun, and the latter part of the decade has seen a gradual shift towards that which is yet to happen.

How does this manifest itself in art? Generally speaking, it focuses on issues of:

a)     the manipulation of the present, for better or for worse, through the politicised display of the possible effects of human-induced risk. In other words, the authoritarian approach towards avoiding perceived impending crises. (For example, think about all of those ‘art & ecology’ type exhibitions taking place everywhere right now.)

b)     commodification of the future through various contemporary business models.

c)     social engineering and design of the built environment, aspiration and lifestyle, and also the implication of cultural production.

Closely related to today’s society of risk management and strategic foresight are Katya Sander’s recent video installations Production of Futures: A Science Fiction about Counting (2008) and Estimations (2008), both produced just before, but happen to be exhibited just as, the global economic crisis was becoming apparent. Estimations documents a number of telephone interviews the artist made with various professional individuals who work in the insurance and re-insurance businesses. Her self-assigned task for the project was to film something that resolutely cannot be estimated according to the perspective of these particular business practices. The unanimous conclusion, conveyed quite casually from the interviewees, is that anything can be estimated in terms of risk, it is really just a question of accuracy. Anything that they could not estimate would not have a descriptive vocabulary as it just wouldn’t matter to them or their commercial clients.

The resulting film’s visuals are of generic cityscape views from a window, which actually manages to magnify the deeply abstract, intangible nature of these types of businesses. Is this the Marxist’s nightmare scenario of a dematerialised, non-commodity, financial economy – wealth generated from the purely hypothetical? In this work, the future presented through the perspective of the futures industry is something that is easy, quantifiable and ultimately exploitable. As the financial crisis has since demonstrated, predicting the future is really a bit like predicting the weather – you can only have any real level of accuracy moments ahead.

This vision of ‘risk society’ is described by the sociologist Ulrich Beck as being part of an inescapable condition of advanced industrialisation, in which many more people have the means to be reflexive towards society and its institutions. He draws a parallel between Marx’s relations of production and relations to definition of risk, as ways to think about the transformations in the conception of social strata today. Beck considers this condition a socially constructed phenomenon that values a person’s relative capacity to define risk for wider society, which has replaced class as a principal inequality. Those that do have the privilege of definition rarely hesitate to utilise its potential for capital, both economic and symbolic.[6] This definition needs to be visualised or made otherwise tangible in order to legitimise itself. In such a situation, aesthetics and aesthetic sensibilities can only become an intrinsic part of this privilege.

Art and its institutions in the 21st Century will need to define their own relations to the notions of risk and uncertainty in society. Museum Futures: Distributed (2008) by Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska is a feature-film originally commissioned especially for the 25th anniversary of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. Rather than respond directly to the specific history (or rather, its info-material residue – the archive) of the institution, Cummings and Lewandowska decided to create a proposition for the prospective direction of the museum. Set in 2058, the film documents the recording of an interview or ‘machinima’ record with the Moderna’s future Executive Ayan Lindquist, in which she openly discusses the particular conditions for new, seemingly advanced, sets of relationships between museums, artists, galleries, art schools, the market economy, and ‘manufactories’. The Moderna is presented as a ‘distributed’ institution with franchises in selected global metropoles including Mumbai and Doha. The artists’ ideological position remains deliberately ambiguous, allowing the film to be a potent tool for a discussion. The future, more ‘distributed’ and openly collaborative institution proposed here could easily be seen as either part of a move towards the super-neo-liberal instrumentalisation of culture, or, a bright, more democratically ‘porous’ and entrepreneurial museum. Some would also argue that both these situations effectively constitute the same thing, but the point here is that this carefully crafted vision set 50 years down the line becomes the trigger for the debate. The Museum Futures: Distributed case is a useful one for this discussion as the work also employs the format of the scenario. The scenario is utilised as a representational device, generating an image of (hopefully inspiring) provocation from a reservoir of possible images; it possesses an awareness of the political economy of science fiction.

As Roelstraete elucidates when discussing the historiographic turn, the research practices of specific artists are often framed by geographical specificity. The Middle East is an interesting case for this, it is a region portrayed through the mainstream media as being caught in a perpetual state of crisis thus unable to break from the present. Much of the art focusing on the region either looks at the imminence of crisis or at key situations from its recent past – think about artist Michael Stevenson’s Persepolis 2530 (2008) project about the downfall of the last Shah of Iran for example, or the ongoing work of the Arab Image Foundation photo archive. The Emirates are the exception in this instance; a place which has become a magnet for the daily arrival of Western artists – from Andreas Gursky to Armin Linke – looking to portray this hallucinogenic apparition, or the ‘evil paradise’, that has emerged in the desert. Seen as the brain-child of untold (and short-sighted) wealth catering to the desire for excess, it is a daring imagination of the future that is actually being realised. Maybe because it doesn’t fit the bill of being ‘Middle-Eastern’ as represented by the media, that the explicit hegemony present within such criticism from the West unveils how a colonial impulse has entered the battle for the future. By relating the Emirates to the Sci-Fi imaginary, there is an amplification of the historical allegory of science fiction – that of identity and difference.

Colonialism is a useful metaphor for describing the control of that mental space available for the ownership of future – it has after all become something we are unable to escape from in the everyday. The future pervades our lives, from politics to projections of graspable lifestyle aspirations, right through to explicit warnings on the consequences of what happens to society if we shop in a certain way at the supermarket. It is both used to repress symbolically and to employ ideological patronage, as Beck states: “the belief that the risks facing humanity can be averted by political action taken on behalf of endangered humanity becomes an unprecedented resource for consensus and legitimation, nationally and internationally”; yet many would still accept an authoritarian approach to having their lives determined. [7]

The guiding principle of Futures Studies as an academic genre is for it to open up the space for individuals to grasp ownership and potential of their own future. In parallel, the most successful artworks and projects about the future are the ones that raise the questions around ownership, specifically of the ‘definitions’ and the ‘resources’ implicit in the control of representation. Art and the future are ultimately created using similar means but to their own purposes, so why shouldn’t one imaginative, aesthetic and conceptual framework for representation be used to interrogate another. No foresight required on this one as the current trends in art suggest that it is happening already.

Nav Haq, 2009

Published in Concept Store #2, Possible, Probable and Preferable Futures. See Journal for details.

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[1] Jameson, F. Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso, 2005. xi

[2] Beck, U. “Risk Society’s Cosmopolitan Moment.” Printed Project 11: Farewell to Post-Colonialism. ed. Sarat Maharaj. Dublin: Visual Arts Ireland, 2008. 69

[3] Jameson, F. Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso, 2005. xi

[4] The Power of Nightmares. Dir. Adam Curtis. BBC. 2004

[5] Roelstraete, D. “The Way of the Shovel: On The Archaeological Imaginary in Art.” E-Flux Journal #4 (2009). <www.e-flux.com/journal/view/51, 2009>.

[6] Beck, U. “Risk Society’s Cosmopolitan Moment.” Printed Project 11: Farewell to Post-Colonialism. ed. Sarat Maharaj. Dublin: Visual Arts Ireland, 2008. 69

[7] Ibid. 71.