[-empyre-] Laying the foundation for The Dawn of Aquarius: Art, Intuition and Technology

[Timothy Conway Murray]

Age of Aquarius!  Writing on this topic brings me back to the days of my life as a young hippie anti-war activist in the San Francisco Bay Area when I attended the uplifting and utopian San Francisco run of the new musical, “Hair,” whose medley “Aquarius: Let the Sunshine In” encouraged everyone on stage and most audience members to joyfully strip down in communal nude dancing.  Even in the midst of that age’s extensive social turmoil, with street movements for anti-war, black power, women’s rights, and the emergent rights of the earth, we were empowered by the promise of Aquarius and the hopeful belief that social struggle would deliver an almost immediate future of justice, social equality, and peace.

Decades down the line, I’ve had occasion more recently to cite in my academic writings on art and new media the legendary American baseball player of the 1950s and early 1960s, Yogi Berra.  Yogi was infamous for his amusing aphorisms.  At the conclusion of my book, Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds, and again in the book I’m just now sending into my publisher, Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art, I pun on one of my favorite Yogi quotes: “The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be.”

My point in remobilizing this aphorism is to reflect on how utopianism might have shifted in the digital age and in the age of the Anthropocene where technology often leads us into a future we might not otherwise have imagined (think of planned obsolescence, AI tracking of social and shopping behavior, genetic modification, and global warming). Aquarius certainly stands now for something much more nuanced, if not troubling, than it did during those celebratory days of San Francisco Flower Power.

Put otherwise how might we consider imagining the certainty of the future we would rather not want to live in?  If we have any certainty about this new Age of Aquarius, it would be about the world of, say, the inevitability of rising global waters due to the ecological warming of fossil fuels. Just as certain, it seems, is the masochistic refusal of global capital to acknowledge its risk to natural ecosystems, if not the neoliberal disinterest in precarity itself, whether the corporate enhancement of global food insecurity, the constant dumping of obsolescent technologies on the shores of Asia, the continual trafficking of human beings for the gain and profit of capitalist buccaneers, the continual oppression and murder of citizens of color by hegemonic networks of surveillance and policing, or even the capitalist disavowal of the viral extremity of our current global pandemic. And does not the doubled borderlessness of new patterns of immigration and old methods of slavery (still via child sex, domestic labor, and genomic doubling) mark the neoliberal precarity of our new digital world order?

It is in this context of Aquarius that I’ve shifted my thinking from the sunshine of the future to the imperatives of thinking futurity itself, whether that of the complexities of Afro-Futurism, the life reconfigurations of the futurity of the Anthropocene, or our continual work via -empyre- to continue raising the questioning of technology as it drives us forward, in the words of both Stiegler and Lyotard, as willing captives of future obsolescence and digital sovereignty.

So, ths is how I’m now thinking the Dawn of Aquarius.  Happy March everyone.

Tim




Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, Cornell Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu<http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English

B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853


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