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

Fri Mar 12 10:23:13 AEDT 2021

Hello empyreans in the second week of Art, Intuition and Technology.

I thought I would make an introductory post by sharing what my
collaborators in the Coven Intelligence Program (efrén cruz cortés, Suzanne
Husky and myself) were up to on the winter solstice, Dec. 21, 2020, the day
also thought to be the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

On that day we conducted a Ritual for a Radical Future, live video
compositing our collective altar with new elements and directions based on
systems of extraction, and introduced participants to our SpellWeaver
application, where we wrote anti-capitalist spells, envisioning "juicy,
tangled futures" that come about through revolutionary alliances of
witches, plants, and machines. SpellWeaver turns spells into weaving
patterns, plant networks and rhizomes, and is based on the larger cosmology
of our project:

"Presaging the disastrous coming of capitalism, ancestral witches hid their
spells and secrets in early forms of computation, deep in the underground,
weaving them into the rhizomatic structure of forests. These spells contain
algorithmic instructions for insurrection and have been running in the
background, brewing over centuries, ready to be decoded by the right
intelligence. On the shortest day of the year, we will dream up this
ancestral vision for a multi-species, tangled, juicy future to call forth
and grow, in preparation for the lengthening of days in the year to come."

https://ybca.org/event/coven-intelligence-program-ritual-for-a-radical-future/
https://covenintelligence.net/

I think this connects well to the issues that Tim brought up regarding the
colonization of the future by a very few, and the possible resistance
offered by SF. I also want to acknowledge that BIPOC communities are
offering profound resistance to this colonization of the future and its
subsequent hopelessness by way of SF at this time. Thinking of Nnedi
Okorafor, and N.K. Jemison, a new collection called "Walking the Clouds: An
Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction" that I haven't read yet, as well
as Sky Hopinka (though I'm not sure he would call his work as futurism
necessarily) and many of the artists in the recent YBCA show, curated by
Thea Quiray Tagle, that the Ritual was a part of (
https://ybca.org/event/after-life-we-survive/), like Art 25 and Super
Futures Haunt Qollective. -- these are just a super quick list off the top
of my head, and there are so many more. It is important to encounter and
amplify these works.

Also thinking of Margaret Rhee's important work here, and her poetic
imaginings of ways to love technology in Love, Robot -- maybe Margaret you
will pick up on this...

Finally, I think one of the things the Coven Intelligence Program is trying
to do, while imagining livable futures (coming as a result of conspiracies
by witches, plants and machines), is to cast another frame on the past,
making it too a site for SF, while also acknowledging the violence of
capitalism, enclosures, colonization.

... Maybe some of us shouldn't be so anxious to head into the future. As a
settler I think I have a lot of reckoning to do with the violence of the
past 500 years, a lot of work to do in terms of recognizing the ways past
is in the present.... Perhaps the grief and reckoning here is its own kind
of resistance, and yes futurity too damaging to engage....

My best,
M

--
beforebefore.net
--

On Tue, Mar 9, 2021 at 4:25 PM Lichty, Patrick M <pl at voyd.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> Prescient words, tim.
> I also agree with the connotation of the profusions of signs in that it
> creates its teleology,  especially in the case of futurism. I have actually
> been around a discipline called Foresight Studies a great deal in the last
> couple years, threw a good friend named Derek Woodgate. And in this vein I
> also remember through another associate, Bruce Sterling, who once wrote
> about the death of science fiction, or it might have been a personal
> conversation. But I do remember is that he noted that in some cases he felt
> that science-fiction bends to the notion of near future speculation. So, in
> your commentary this idea that somehow late stage capitalism and the techno
> industrial complex wants to make for itself an airtight narrative so that
> it cannot feel any question about its future or speculate on its material
> gain.  The one thing that is interesting to me is that people in Foresight
> Studies are fully aware of the challenges that humanity faces in the next
> hundred years, while the techno-industrial complex is seeing itself on a
> linear trajectory or even what I call a “exponentialist“” trajectory
> without any material limitations, which we know can’t happen.
>
>
>
> What has gotten my interest about this conversation is the notion of where
> human systems of care (age of Aquarius as an exemplar) fit within this meal
> you while the existing superstructure seems to be making less and less and
> less of a space for it. With AI, increased mechanization, there seems to be
> a coming future where there is an excess of labor that is somehow
> “obviously” set to function in the terms of the human imaginary and realms
> of fantasy, but this seems to be mainly a first world reality or
> possibility while in the rest of the world this xx labor will basically be
> seen as a human burden.
>
>
>
> In the exponentialist era of technology in the 21st-century that is
> running straight for the situation of environmental struggle I wonder how
> we can put these systems in place while bringing humanity into a landing
> for the long term.
>
>
>
> Hello, and all my best from our new situation in Minnesota.
>
>
>
> *From: *<empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Timothy
> Conway Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu>
> *Date: *Monday, March 8, 2021 at 11:44 AM
> *To: *"empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" <
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
> *Subject: *[-empyre-] Laying the foundation for The Dawn of Aquarius:
> Art, Intuition and Technology
>
>
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> Thanks, Renate, for asking me to elaborate on Jean-François Lyotard’s
> concerns about the technological “pull of the future.”  Before we
> transition into the second week of our discussion, I might just clarify
> that Lyotard was concerned about how the weight of the emergent digital age
> (he was writing about this in the late 1980s and early 1990s) might impinge
> upon the plenitude of thinking and experiencing life in any aquarian “now.”
>
>
>
> Sounding the alarm over the degree of risk inherent in new digital
> technologies, Lyotard notes that the transformation of the perceptual event
> by the technical-industrial complex guarantees that the future won’t be
> what it used to be. “As is clearly shown by the development of the
> techno-scientific system, technology and the culture associated with it are
> under a necessity to pursue their rise . . . The human race is, so to
> speak, “pulled forward” by this process without possessing the slightest
> capacity for mastering it . . . In as much as a monad in thus saturating
> its memory is stocking the future, the present loses its privilege of being
> an ungraspable point from which, however, time should always distribute
> itself between the “not yet” of the future and the “no longer” of the past”
> (Lyotard, The Inhuman, 64-65). The pulling forward of futurity, as
> evidenced by the economy of planned technological obsolescence, thus
> depletes the magnetism of the present as the energetic and ungraspable
> hinge between past and future. It is in the drive of this informatic pull
> of the future that Bernard Stiegler, similarly, locates the highest degree
> of risk in the rise of global media. At stake for him is the dissolution of
> the plenitude of fiction and fantasy that might rewire the ontologies of
> military-industrial-digital capitalism. Stiegler ushers the dire warning
> that “the technical network of the production and diffusion of symbols
> produced for a planetary industry [the system of *téléaction*] can
> overwhelm the universal desire of fiction and at the same time condition
> the entire evolution of humanity at the risk of exhausting its desire for
> fables” (Stiegler, Technics and Time II, 30). In my forthcoming book, *Technics
> Improvised*, I wonder about the impact of such a deadening profusion of
> planetary symbols and power relations, contrary to the imaginary of any age
> of aquarius. When technology so morphs into its own teleology, as the
> advance of a thoroughly predetermined futurity of technology for
> technology’s sake, little space is left for fiction, little possibility for
> speculative imagination, little space for the joys of thinking the future
> otherwise.
>
> Thanks for introducing what looks like a creative month on -empyre-.
>
> Best to all as we welcome the arrival of warmer temperatures in Ithaca
> this week.
>
> 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
>
> Professor of Comparative Literature and English
>
>
>
> B-1 West Sibley Hall
>
> Cornell University
>
> Ithaca, New York 14853
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________ empyre forum
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