Description

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Theorists, historians, and artists address the precarious futurity of the notion of the future.

Not long ago, a melancholic left and a manic neoliberalism seemed to arrive at an awkward consensus: the foreclosure of futurity. Whereas the former mourned the failure of its utopian project, the latter celebrated the triumph of a global marketplace. The radical hope of realizing a singularly different, more equitable future displaced by a belief that the future had already come to pass, limiting post-historical society to an uneventful life of endless accumulation. Today, amidst an abundance of neofuturisms, posthumanisms, futurologies, speculative philosophies and accelerationist scenarios, there is as well an expanding awareness of a looming planetary catastrophe driven by the extractionist logic of capitalism. Despite this return to the future, the temporal horizon of our present moment is perhaps more aptly characterized by the “shrinking future” of just-in-time production, risk management, high-frequency trading, and the futures market. In Futurity Report, theorists, historians, and artists address the precarious futurity of the notion of the future itself.

Contributors

McKenzie Wark, China Miéville, Kerstin Stakemeier, Diedrich Diederichsen, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Vishmidt, Johannes Paul Raether, Felicity D. Scott, Silvia Maglioni, Graeme Thomson, Doreen Mende, Pedro Neves Marques, Achille Mbembe, Kodwo Eshun, Haytham El-Wardany, T. J. Demos, Ana Teixeira Pinto

About the Author

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Eric C. H. de Bruyn is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Freie Universität, Berlin. He is an editor of Grey Room and he has written for, among other publications, Art Journal, Artforum, and Texte zur Kunst.

Sven Lütticken, an art historian and critic, teaches at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. He is the author of Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (Sternberg Press) and other books.

McKenzie Wark (she/her), awarded the 2019 Thoma Prize for writing in digital art, is the author of A Hacker Manifesto Gamer Theory, and The Beach Beneath the Street. Wark's correspondence with Kathy Acker was published by Semiotext(e) as I'm Very Into You.

Diedrich Diederichsen is Professor of Theory, Practice, and Communication of Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian is an artist living in Berlin.

Sven Lütticken, an art historian and critic, teaches at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. He is the author of Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (Sternberg Press) and other books.

Felicity D. Scott is Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, where she directs the PhD program in architecture and codirects the program in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture. She is the author of Architecture or Techno-utopia: Politics after Modernism (MIT Press).

Sven Lütticken, an art historian and critic, teaches at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. He is the author of Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (Sternberg Press) and other books.

Kodwo Eshun lectures in Aural and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths College, University of London. In 2002 he cofounded, with Anjalika Sagar, The Otolith Group, a collective working across film and video, artists' writing, and exhibition curation. He is the author of More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction and has written for publications including The Guardian, The Wire, and frieze.

Haytham El-Wardany is an Egyptian writer currently residing in Berlin. He recently published Kitab Al-Nawm (The Book of Sleep).

T. J. Demos, an award-winning writer, is Professor of Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely about contemporary art, global politics, and ecology, and is the author, most recently, of Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press).

Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer and theorist, based in Berlin.