(Im)perfect Futures: Utopia as Escape, Inspiration, Critique and Danger
- Sept. 10, 2017
Intermission screenings between addresses by the speakers: GVN908, “Pandemonium”, Sonny Vijai Vadgama, “The Blood within us”, the teaser of “Hypernormalisation”, Adam Curtis.
Do you remember the future? The dreams of interplanetary escape from the Earth and its problems are not a novelty. Utopian thinking is a form of critical dissection of the real, as well as mental escape from the political impotence. What the utopia of leaving the Earth tells about our present? The convention and normality are in the centre of preserving everlasting stability of the everyday. The reluctance to change and fear of conscious adaptation to rapidly changing environment is enforcing the wall of ignorance, which finds its most vivid visualisation in recent political turbulence. The end of history hasn’t happened: instead ‘the real’ had scattered in pieces like a broken looking glass, opening potentiality for infinite subjective interpretations. How the promise of multiplicity of possible futures is reflected in arts and engages with the disciplines beyond it?
The invited speakers represent the broad spectrum of contemporary approaches to futures as a subject of transdisciplinary investigations.