Keywords
tertiary retention
tertiary protention
technotopia
artistic imagination
How to Cite
Abstract
This essay begins with the question what the future is and how humanity has attempted to predict and control it throughout history. Drawing on philosophers such as Rousseau, Bernard Stiegler and Yuk Hui the article unfolds the argument that the idea about the future is closely intertwined with the development of technology. The evolution of tertiary retention (Stiegler) and tertiary protention (Hui) leads to the contemporary situation in which the calculating techno-logos has become so ubiquitous that it has set the horizon for both utopian (e.g. futurism) and dystopian (e.g. cyberpunk) visions of the future. To overcome the ethical myopia of such discourses, we need to find a radical imagination beyond the techno-topic horizon. The essay discusses two interactive art-science projects “Mitigation of Shock” (Superflux 2017-2019) and “Aerocene Pacha” (Saraceno 2020) as examples which transcend the techno-topic framework by transforming technology from the inside. These works unfold beyond the images and narratives about technology. Instead, they utilize technoscientific instruments only to radically reverse thinking about what technology could be and how it could contribute to the creation of desirable futures. Rooted in the DIY ethos of experimentation and inventiveness these artworks raise heightened awareness of human interdependence with other non-human species and intelligences and profound concern for ecological balance. Grand narratives of the future, infused with enthusiasm or fear, are replaced with patience, care, and receptivity to the full complexity of situations in the present. The future in this case is neither abstract nor empty, and although fundamentally open to transformation, it is alive in the present. Such projects generate new forms of cognition and attune our senses to potentialities existing beyond the calculated probabilities, proposed as an automated self-reproduction of the technocratic logos governing existing socio-political forms of coexistence.
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