The Next Ten Billion Years

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

The Next Ten Billion Years

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Sep 09, 2013 7:16 pm

I'm a fan of John Michael Greer as well as a fan of creative writing exploring futuristic scenarios. What I particularly liked about this piece is that it addresses the future of not just human life, but life itself in our galaxy.


Wednesday, September 04, 2013

The Next Ten Billion Years

Earlier this week, I was trying to think of ways to talk about the gap between notions about the future we’ve all absorbed from the last three hundred years of fossil-fueled progress, on the one hand, and the ways of thinking about what’s ahead that might actually help us make sense of our predicament and the postpetroleum, post-progress world ahead, on the other. While I was in the middle of these reflections, a correspondent reminded me of a post from last year by peak oil blogger Ugo Bardi, which set out to place the crises of our time in the context of the next ten billion years.

It’s an ambitious project, and by no means badly carried out. The only criticism that comes to mind is that it only makes sense if you happen to be a true believer in the civil religion of progress, the faith whose rise and impending fall has been a central theme here in recent months. As a sermon delivered to the faithful of that religion, it’s hard to beat; it’s even got the classic structure of evangelical rhetoric—the awful fate that will soon fall upon those who won’t change their wicked ways, the glorious salvation awaiting those who get right with Progress, and all the rest of it.

Of course the implied comparison with Christianity can only be taken so far. Christians are generally expected to humble themselves before their God, while believers in progress like to imagine that humanity will become God or, as in this case, be able to pat God fondly on the head and say, “That’s my kid.” More broadly, those of my readers who were paying attention last week will notice that the horrible fate that awaits the sinful is simply that nature will be allowed to go her own way, while the salvation awaiting the righteous is more or less the ability to browbeat nature into doing what they think she ought to do—or rather, what Bardi’s hypothesized New Intelligence, whose interests are assumed to be compatible with those of humanity, thinks she ought to do.

There’s plenty that could be said about the biophobia—the stark shivering dread of life’s normal and healthy ripening toward death—that pervades this kind of thinking, but that’s a subject for another post. Here I’d like to take another path. Once the notions of perpetual progress and imminent apocalypse are seen as industrial society’s traditional folk mythologies, rather than meaningful resources for making predictions about the future, and known details about ecology, evolution, and astrophysics are used in their place to fill out the story, the next ten billion years looks very different from either of Bardi’s scenarios. Here’s my version or, if you will, my vision.

Ten years from now:

Business as usual continues; the human population peaks at 8.5 billion, liquid fuels production remains more or less level by the simple expedient of consuming an ever larger fraction of the world’s total energy output, and the annual cost of weather-related disasters continues to rise. Politicians and the media insist loudly that better times are just around the corner, as times get steadily worse. Among those who recognize that something’s wrong, one widely accepted viewpoint holds that fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will shortly solve all our problems, and therefore we don’t have to change the way we live. Another, equally popular, insists that total human extinction is scarcely a decade away, and therefore we don’t have to change the way we live. Most people who worry about the future accept one or the other claim, while the last chance for meaningful systemic change slips silently away.

A hundred years from now:

It has been a difficult century. After more than a dozen major wars, three bad pandemics, widespread famines, and steep worldwide declines in public health and civil order, human population is down to 3 billion and falling. Sea level is up ten meters and rising fast as the Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps disintegrate; fossil fuel production ground to a halt decades earlier as the last economically producible reserves were exhausted, and most proposed alternatives turned out to be unaffordable in the absence of the sort of cheap, abundant, highly concentrated energy only fossil fuels can provide. Cornucopians still insist that fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will save us any day now, and their opponents still insist that human extinction is imminent, but most people are too busy trying to survive to listen to either group.

A thousand years from now:

The Earth is without ice caps and glaciers for the first time in twenty million years or so, and sea level has gone up more than a hundred meters worldwide; much of the world has a tropical climate, as it did 50 million years earlier. Human population is 100 million, up from half that figure at the bottom of the bitter dark age now passing into memory. Only a few scholars have any idea what the words “fusion power,” “artificial intelligence,” and “interstellar migration” once meant, and though there are still people insisting that the end of the world will arrive any day now, their arguments now generally rely more overtly on theology than before. New civilizations are rising in various corners of the world, combining legacy technologies with their own unique cultural forms. The one thing they all have in common is that the technological society of a millennium before is their idea of evil incarnate.

Ten thousand years from now:

The rise in global temperature has shut down the thermohaline circulation and launched an oceanic anoxic event, the planet’s normal negative feedback process when carbon dioxide levels get out of hand. Today’s industrial civilization is a dim memory from the mostly forgotten past, as far removed from this time as the Neolithic Revolution is from ours; believers in most traditional religions declare piously that the climate changes of the last ten millennia are the results of human misbehavior, while rationalists insist that this is all superstition and the climate changes have perfectly natural causes. As the anoxic oceans draw carbon out of the biosphere and entomb it in sediments on the sea floor, the climate begins a gradual cooling—a process which helps push humanity’s sixth global civilization into its terminal decline.

A hundred thousand years from now:

Carbon dioxide levels drop below preindustrial levels as the oceanic anoxic event finishes its work, and the complex feedback loops that govern Earth’s climate shift again: the thermohaline circulation restarts, triggering another round of climatic changes. Humanity’s seventy-ninth global civilization flourishes and begins its slow decline as the disruptions set in motion by a long-forgotten industrial age are drowned out by an older climatic cycle. The scholars of that civilization are thrilled by the notions of fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration; they have no idea that we dreamed the same dreams before them, being further in our future than the Neanderthals are in our past, but they will have no more luck achieving those dreams than we did.

A million years from now:

The Earth is in an ice age; great ice sheets cover much of the northern hemisphere and spread from mountain ranges all over the world, and sea level is 150 meters lower than today. To the people living at this time, who have never known anything else, this seems perfectly normal. Metals have become rare geological specimens—for millennia now, most human societies have used renewable ceramic-bioplastic composites instead—and the very existence of fossil fuels has long since been forgotten. The 664th global human civilization is at its peak, lofting aerostat towns into the skies and building great floating cities on the seas; its long afternoon will eventually draw to an end after scores of generations, and when it falls, other civilizations will rise in its place.

Ten million years from now:

The long glacial epoch that began in the Pleistocene has finally ended, and the Earth is returning to its more usual status as a steamy jungle planet. This latest set of changes proves to be just that little bit too much for humanity. No fewer than 8,639 global civilizations have risen and fallen over the last ten million years, each with its own unique sciences, technologies, arts, literatures, philosophies, and ways of thinking about the cosmos; the shortest-lived lasted for less than a century before blowing itself to smithereens, while the longest-lasting endured for eight millennia before finally winding down.

All that is over now. There are still relict populations of human beings in Antarctica and a few island chains, and another million years will pass before cascading climatic and ecological changes finally push the last of them over the brink into extinction. Meanwhile, in the tropical forests of what is now southern Siberia, the descendants of raccoons who crossed the Bering land bridge during the last great ice age are proliferating rapidly, expanding into empty ecological niches once filled by the larger primates. In another thirty million years or so, their descendants will come down from the trees.

One hundred million years from now:

Retro-rockets fire and fall silent as the ungainly craft settles down on the surface of the Moon. After feverish final checks, the hatch is opened, and two figures descend onto the lunar surface. They are bipeds, but not even remotely human; instead, they belong to Earth’s third intelligent species. They are distantly descended from the crows of our time, though they look no more like crows than you look like the tree shrews of the middle Cretaceous. Since you have a larynx rather than a syrinx, you can’t even begin to pronounce what they call themselves, so we’ll call them corvins.

Earth’s second intelligent species, whom we’ll call cyons after their raccoon ancestors, are long gone. They lasted a little more than eight million years before the changes of an unstable planet sent them down the long road to extinction; they never got that deeply into technology, though their political institutions made the most sophisticated human equivalents look embarrassingly crude. The corvins are another matter. Some twist of inherited psychology left them with a passion for heights and upward movement; they worked out the basic principles of the hot air balloon before they got around to inventing the wheel, and balloons, gliders, and corvin-carrying kites play much the same roles in their earliest epic literature that horses and chariots play in ours.

As corvin societies evolved more complex technologies, eyes gazed upwards from soaring tower-cities at the moon, the perch of perches set high above the world. All that was needed to make those dreams a reality was petroleum, and a hundred million years is more than enough time for the Earth to restock her petroleum reserves—especially if that period starts off with an oceanic anoxic event that stashes gigatons of carbon in marine sediments. Thus it was inevitable that, sooner or later, the strongest of the great corvin kith-assemblies would devote its talents and wealth to the task of reaching the moon.

The universe has a surprise in store for the corvins, though. Their first moon landing included among its goals the investigation of some odd surface features, too small to be seen clearly by Earth-based equipment. That first lander thus set down on a flat lunar plain that, a very long time ago, was called the Sea of Tranquillity, and so it was that the stunned corvin astronauts found themselves facing the unmistakable remains of a spacecraft that arrived on the moon in the unimaginably distant past.

A few equivocal traces buried in terrestrial sediments had suggested already to corvin loremasters that another intelligent species might have lived on the Earth before them, though the theory was dismissed by most as wild speculation. The scattered remnants on the Moon confirmed them, and made it hard for even the most optimistic corvins to embrace the notion that some providence guaranteed the survival of intelligent species. The curious markings on some of the remains, which some loremasters suggested might be a mode of visual communication, resisted all attempts at decipherment, and very little was ever learnt for certain about the enigmatic ancient species that left its mark on the Moon.

Even so, it will be suggested long afterwards that the stark warning embodied in those long-abandoned spacecraft played an important role in convincing corvin societies to rein in the extravagant use of petroleum and other nonrenewable resources, though it also inspired hugely expensive and ultimately futile attempts to achieve interstellar migration—for some reason the corbins never got into the quest for fusion power or artificial intelligence. One way or another, though, the corvins turned out to be the most enduring of Earth’s intelligent species, and more than 28 million years passed before their day finally ended.

One billion years from now:

The Earth is old and mostly desert, and a significant fraction of its total crust is made up of the remains of bygone civilizations. The increasing heat of the Sun as it proceeds through its own life cycle, and the ongoing loss of volatile molecules from the upper atmosphere into space, have reduced the seas to scattered, salty basins amid great sandy wastes. Only near the north and south poles does vegetation flourish, and with it the corbicules, Earth’s eleventh and last intelligent species. Their ancestors in our time are an invasive species of freshwater clam. (Don’t laugh; a billion years ago your ancestors were still trying to work out the details of multicellularity.)

The corbicules have the same highly practical limb structure as the rest of their subphylum: six stumpy podicles for walking, two muscular dorsal tentacles for gross manipulations and two slender buccal tentacles by the mouth for fine manipulations. They spend most of their time in sprawling underground city-complexes, venturing to the surface to harvest vegetation to feed the subterranean metafungal gardens that provide them with nourishment. By some combination of luck and a broad general tendency toward cephalization common to many evolutionary lineages, Earth’s last intelligent species is also its most intellectually gifted; hatchlings barely out of creche are given fun little logic problems such as Fermat’s last theorem for their amusement, and a large majority of adult corbicules are involved in one or another field of intellectual endeavor. Being patient, long-lived, and not greatly addicted to collective stupidities, they have gone very far indeed.

Some eight thousand years back, a circle of radical young corbicule thinkers proposed the project of working out all the physical laws of the cosmos, starting from first principles. So unprecedented a suggestion sparked countless debates, publications, ceremonial dances, and professional duels in which elderly scholars killed themselves in order to cast unbearable opprobrium on their rivals. Still, it was far too delectable an intellectual challenge to be left unanswered, and the work has proceeded ever since. In the course of their researches, without placing any great importance on the fact, the best minds among the corbicules have proved conclusively that nuclear fusion, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration were never practical options in the first place.

Being patient, long-lived, and not greatly addicted to collective stupidities, the corbicules have long since understood and accepted their eventual fate. In another six million years, as the Sun expands and the Earth’s surface temperature rises, the last surface vegetation will perish and the corbicules will go extinct; in another ninety million years, the last multicellular life forms will die out; in another two hundred million years, the last seas will boil, and Earth’s biosphere, nearing the end of its long, long life, will nestle down into the deepest crevices of its ancient, rocky world and drift into a final sleep.

Ten billion years from now:

Earth is gone. It had a splendid funeral; its body plunged into stellar fire as the Sun reached its red giant stage and expanded out to the orbit of Mars, and its ashes were flung outwards into interstellar space with the first great helium flash that marked the beginning of the Sun’s descent toward its destiny. Two billion years later, the gas- and dust-rich shockwave from that flash plowed into a mass of interstellar dust dozens of light-years away from the Sun’s pale corpse, and kickstarted one of the great transformative processes of the cosmos.

Billions more years have passed since that collision. A yellow-orange K-2 star burns cheerily in the midst of six planets and two asteroid belts. The second planet has a surface temperature between the freezing and boiling points of water, and a sufficiently rich assortment of elements to set another of the great transformative processes of the cosmos into motion. Now, in one spot on the surface of this world, rising up past bulbous purplish things that don’t look anything like trees but fill the same broad ecological function, there is a crag of black rock. On top of that crag, a creature sits looking at the stars, fanning its lunules with its sagittal crest and waving its pedipalps meditatively back and forth. It is one of the first members of its world’s first intelligent species, and it is—for the first time ever on that world—considering the stars and wondering if other beings might live out there among them.

The creature’s biochemistry, structure, and life cycle have nothing in common with yours, dear reader. Its world, its sensory organs, its mind and its feelings would be utterly alien to you, even if ten billion years didn’t separate you. Nonetheless, it so happens that a few atoms that are currently part of your brain, as you read these words, will also be part of the brain-analogue of the creature on the crag on that distant, not-yet-existing world. Does that fact horrify you, intrigue you, console you, leave you cold? We’ll discuss the implications of that choice next week.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
User avatar
stillrobertpaulsen
 
Posts: 2414
Joined: Wed Jan 14, 2009 2:43 pm
Location: California
Blog: View Blog (37)

Re: The Next Ten Billion Years

Postby Searcher08 » Tue Sep 10, 2013 7:34 am

Thank you for that wonderful, enthralling piece of mind-food!
I much preferred Greer's piece to the one he referenced.

One of the things which surprised me most about both pieces was the lack of the effect of ETI contact. Systems always tend to be more impacted by the larger syste in which they are embedded than is assumed - and I was reminded by the Chilbolton 'warning' crop-circle which appeared to be from an A.I. / silicon based intelligence.

Am really into scenario planning (it's origins are fascinating) and the importance of Causal Textures, where it is not just broadly 'good' and bad', but also ones that are subject to extreme discontinuity (eg the appearence of a WorldWideWeb) and to great ambiguity (ie the equivalent of being in 'fog')...
User avatar
Searcher08
 
Posts: 5887
Joined: Thu Dec 20, 2007 10:21 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Next Ten Billion Years

Postby kelley » Tue Sep 10, 2013 8:22 am

an interesting topic for sure.

have been obsessed with this piece for weeks:

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/some-trac ... esthetics/

and read it contra some of the discussion in the 'hauntology' threads. what it shares with the above is the imagination of a future in which humanity isn't the primary actor or agent. bratton's speculative writing viz aesthetics, politics, and technology certainly takes the next hundred years into deep account in his description of what he's calling a 'post-anthropocene' era which is born during this age of algorithmic capitalism, and his language is nicely inventive throughout.

it's a bit long, but mos def worth a look:

. . .

Benjamin Bratton
Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics

Frame

Any conjunction between aesthetics and politics (for a political aesthetic, an aestheticized politics, a geopolitical aesthetic, a politics of aesthetics, and so forth) is necessarily fraught by estranged agendas—all the more reason for us to conceive of their inter-activation from a willfully ahumanist perspective. Aesthetics and/or politics of what and for what? The cascade of Anthrocidal traumas—from Copernicus and Darwin, to postcolonial and ecological inversions, to transphylum neuroscience and synthetic genomics, from nanorobotics to queer AI—pulverize figure and ground relations between doxic political traditions and aesthetic discourses. Before any local corpus (the biological body, formal economics, military state, legal corporation, geographic nation, scientific accounting, sculptural debris, or immanent theology) can conserve and appreciate its self-image within the boundaries of its preferred reflection, already its Vitruvian conceits of diagrammatic idealization, historical agency, radiating concentric waves of embodiment, instrumental prostheticization, and manifest cognition are, each in sequence, unwoven by the radically asymmetrical indifferences of plastic matter across unthinkable scales, both temporal and spatial. But while the received brief for political aesthetics is denuded, abnormal assignments proliferate.

This avenue toward post-humanism is a reckoning with planetarity and its incompleteness.1 Geophilosophy, by one path, ambles from a Ptolemaic yolk nested within protective layers of crystalline spheres; to Kantian Geography, for which the commonality of the earth’s crusty surface guarantees Cosmopolitanism; to Deleuzian and Schellengian solutions of the painterly image-force; to numinous or occult conspiracies of geologic violence; and now to a comparative planetology for which the earth as a mediating polis can only be thought through aesthetics derived from, not imposed upon, the computation of possible geometries, subdivisions, doubles, inversions, localizations, and Hubble-scale adoptions from the outside.2 This latter project entails an acceleration from the initial recognition of local planetary economics toward a more universal recombinancy for which the political and aesthetic representations of human experience are tilted off-center. From that outside looking back in, the generative alienations brought about by potential xenopolitics, xenoaesthetics, xenoarchitectonics, xenotechnics, and so on, turn back upon the now inside-out geopolitical aesthetic for which the relevance of human polities (human art, human experience) seems weird and conditional.3 How might we grope toward an inventory of these contingencies? What index of effects would allow us to read this situation even as it is unresolved and perhaps unresolvable for us? To transform our own relations to these displacements, what could do the work for a geopolitical aesthetics by and for a nearly extinct Anthropocenic subject, even and because it refuses the phobic bigotries of “political aesthetics?” If the term “accelerationist” can refer to a reckoning with that post-Anthropocenic exteriority and its extant available clues, more than to the dromologic velocity of our auto-programmatic tiny machines, then is this an accelerationist geopolitical aesthetic, and if so, then toward what rich absences?

This short essay climbs into a tiny nook within these larger questions, and so instead of making global claims regarding the ontology of these contingencies, or about their relative significance for philosophy, or political claims about their uncomfortable potential homologies with the alphanumerics of Algorithmic Capitalism, it instead suggests an incomplete roster of local traces and degraded effects of that geopolitical aesthetic already in our midst. I am particularly interested in how these effects interface with what replaces the emptied legacy positions of “Polity” and “Aesthetics” directly through confrontation with what we can broadly call Design. In particular, we are attentive to how planetary-scale computation’s instrumentalization of Design to model its political arrivals also provides “aesthetic” programs which are less reflective of political realities than generative of their material evolution. For this, the work of computation as a style of thought, while today overdetermined by its economic instrumentality, is held open by the final incompleteness of algorithmic indeterminacy, and through this can directly engender unknown and unknowable political architectures.


Pamela Rosenkranz, Purity of Vapors, 2012. Silicone, pigments, SmartWater bottles, refrigerator. Photo: Gunnar Meier. Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York and Karma International, Zurich.

2.

But first we compare this accounting of trace-effects, as seen through the restricted pixelated prisms of Design and Computation, to what Steven Shaviro calls an “accelerationist aesthetics,” especially as strongly differentiated by him from an accelerationist politics.4 For Shaviro, the value of an accelerationist aesthetics is to draw out “what it feels like” to live in the contemporary moment, as partially determined by inhuman displacements like those noted above. Accelerationist aesthetics accomplishes this conjuring prototypes of what comes after the inevitable Anthropocenic crashes, so that we might envision and evaluate our adaptations in advance. Rather than blithely offering pap “design innovations” with which we might spend our way past death, this indulgence in imagining without reserve the world-without-us-to-come presumes huge sums of general catastrophe and stares straight down the rabbit hole. For this, Thanatos isn’t a diagnosis. It is simply a site condition. However, for Shaviro this becomes an exercise in cognitive mapping that may provide “the individual subject with some heightened sense of place.”5 We will take strong exception to this last recommendation. The way one reads Shaviro’s abridgment, for him an accelerationist politics comes with no discernible, coherent plan for the amelioration of eco-economic entropy hear and now, no clear path out, nor even a dialectical guarantee of ultimate outcomes. It is therefore disqualified as a suitable program for apparently well-understood “political” goals. The corollary aesthetic project, however, contains a useful pedagogical spark that could, at some distance, train and redeem a recognizable politics through the shock of its unrecognizable affect. My interest is exactly the opposite: an unrecognizable politics through a recognizable aesthetics, by drawing collapses, not distinctions, between the two. Foremost because this is to make it utterly impossible to map the situation through anything like the self-regard of an “individual subject.” That is first to go, but apparently not the last to leave.

3.

To predict (and prototype) what will and will not survive the Anthropocene demands that artist/designer speculate upon irreducibly complex material interdependencies (of oil, water, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, avian influenza, rotting iron, insect biomass, plankton genomics, and so forth), as well as speculate upon the effects that the subtraction or amplification of any one of these will have on the others. These things are impossible to really know (and yet nothing deserves more attention) and so anything like a “geopolitical aesthetic” in the Jamesonian sense (a cinematic mechanism, however conspiratorial, for the comprehension of a World System and its waves of control) is necessarily an exercise in apophenia, in drawing connections and conclusions from sources with no direct connection other than their indissoluble perceptual simultaneity. This apophenia, a seeing of patterns where there is actually only noise, is neither a failure of imagination nor a virtue, but rather an unavoidable qualification of our predicament and its (only partially decipherable) aftermath. There cannot be a post-Anthropocenic “politics” in any recognizable, normative sense—a “politics” predicated on the self-regard of the human subject mapping himself as a coherent agent within a stable historical unfolding. It’s just not possible to distinguish between what is an existential risk and what is an absolute invention, and what is both at once, and mobilize “positions” accordingly. So mobilization must go on without that distinction. To govern—that is, to account for the general economy of decay and creation with some nominal degree of authorship—something else is required.

We are brought to this Anthropocenic precipice not just by a cosmic predicament but by the tempestuous, ambivalent violences of Capitalism, particularly our current Algorithmic Capitalism. But do we contain it, or it us? This economics is, on the one hand, the megamachine of incredible Anthropocentric composition and consumption, and on the other, the appropriation of planetary matter, including human flesh, without concern for politics or limit, by an “intelligence from the future.”6 Capitalism is seen at one and the same time as a compulsive eco-economics linked inextricably to our omnivore dominance, and/or an alien entropy machine for the processing of terrestrial material, value, and information into absolute speed, peeling back the husk of human markets so as to finally suck dry the complicit mammalian diagram. To eat or to be eaten? But this reversibility of insides and outsides is perhaps exactly why it is necessary to retrain the work of the “political” away from a direct confrontation with or acceleration of Capitalism as the scope of the problem as such, and instead towards a direct engagement-in-advance with what succeeds and exceeds it.

Instead of “post-Capitalism” as the futural specter on call, I prefer the more encompassing “post-Anthropocene.”7 The latter names not only another eco-economic order but articulates in advance the displacement of the human agent from the subjective center of its operations. It measures its situation from picoseconds to geologic temporal scopes, and nanometric to comparative-planetary scales, and back again. It does not name in advance, as some precondition for its mobilization today, all the terms with which it will eventually have at its disposal in the future. The aporia of the post-Anthropocene is not answered by the provocation of its naming, and this is its strength over alternatives that identify too soon what exactly must be gained or lost by our passage off the ledge. The post-Anthropocene indicates that the organizing work of a “xenogeopolitical aesthetics” (or whatever) can be done only in relation to a mature alienation from human history and anthropocentric time and scale. As it foreshadows and foregrounds the eclipse and extinction of Anthropocenic anthropology and corresponding models of governance, it establishes not only that humanism disappears with humans, and vice versa, but that the more elemental genetic machines with which we now co-embody flesh can and will, in time, re-appear and express themselves as unthinkable new animal machines, and with them, New Earths. The apophenia is never resolved for us after all.


Film still from Todd Haynes’s movie Safe, 1995.

4.

Perhaps the most critical gambit for any Accelerationist geopolitical aesthetic is its simultaneous location within evolutionary disappearance and appearance, in conservation and expression and as reciprocal outcomes (including also extinction). Consider the “arche-fossil,” presented by Quentin Meillassoux as an evidentiary demonstration of a basic encounter between the abyssal reality of ancestrality and the universal dislocation of thought from worlding, even the worlds of fossilized primordia which it can, eventually, contemplate through a confrontation with such geochemical stains. For the post-Anthropocene, and our contingent disorientations (apophenias, aesthetics, designs) we must pivot and rotate that arche-fossil’s temporal trajectory from one of ancestrality toward one of alien descendence. Just as we are forced to see in the fossil the contingency of a world that precedes thought, we are also forced to encounter in advance—as a measure of the present condition—the descendent for which we are the ancestor and for which we are the unthinkable fossil. Unlike the real fossil, that descendant cannot be held in hand, even as its chemistry storms within us and around us. Our presence is but an anterior precondition for our future dissolution, and for the appearance of another unthinkable phylum, on-planet or off-planet, for which our thought and trace will be as alien, inaccessible, and horrifying in its indifference as the Cenozoic fossil is to us now.

Thanatos, the organism’s compulsive drive toward dissolution back into the world, is not the most critical economy for accelerationism, as the passage from organic into inorganic is just as easily inverted and extinguishment may be overtaken by emergence.8 At work is not then instead Eros, the conservation and reproduction of the organism, but on the contrary, an open-ended scanning of possibilities through which the silhouette of the organism is to be cast off like dead skin so that something irregular might arrive from within and without at once, over and over again, until through genetic and allogenetic iteration, the vestigial trace of the human ancestor is absorbed. While the work of organismic evolution may be to find ever more circuitous paths toward death (and of Capitalism to trace ever more winding paths to collapse), the work of the expanded phylogenome is a more open-ended convolution toward adaptation, invention, diversion, and reiteration. The perspective offered on our contemporary moment by this ancestral retrospection-in-advance challenges the conceit that, should Anthropocenic ecological collapse make familiar human systems untenable, then the chemical and genetic projects localized in our phylum, biomass, and phenotype will have no reality. They may. They may not. Either way, the best of all possible news is that, should “we” survive the Anthropocene, it will not be as “humans.” To the extent that the arcs of this slow displacement can be drawn, felt or modeled, then a post-Anthropocenic geopolitical aesthetics has meaning. Otherwise it has, none.


A rendering of Google’s self-driving car’s visualization of a street.

5. Inventory

From musings on the interests of species and phylum during transitions to and from geologic eras, I will now careen back to our very local and specific involvement with certain trace-effects that might be read as constitutive indicators of some cleavage between the Anthropocene and the post-Anthropocene. It’s possible as well that these may prove instead to be just fleeting tendencies, perhaps symbolic of something more important, but which are themselves only novelties. I can’t say. Mine is not a roster of mission-critical assets, not even a beginning of a real summary, but merely a sample inventory that may prove to have special significance. If a link is possible between these and a “politics” interested in acceleration toward a post-Anthropocenic condition, it is because the biopolitical context of our Algorithmic Capitalism is itself, for better and worse, already a strong leverage point in the larger dramas of planetary-scale conversion, decay, restoration, and wholesale replacement. Inadvertent geoengineering during the Anthropocenic era has involved us in ecologic gambling beyond our means, and so, a strong distinction between an accelerationist aesthetics versus politics is likely not very beneficial. This is not because aesthetics serves as some master vehicle of encounter with the distribution of sensibility, participation, and truth-telling about lifeworlds, but because (like the weirdly ahumanist traces below) they are forms of design and designation that qualify the affect of our post-Anthropocenic precipice by constituting it, rather than reflecting, suggesting, mirroring, or metaphorizing it for us through some public congress. It is less important that they dramatize something dangerous about the world we will face than that they physically incorporate and modify that world in advance without our supervision, oversight or guidance.

For example, while the critical path of the Thanotonic economy traces living organisms back into inorganic matter by a deep momentum toward ultimate reabsorption with the dead ocean, in the early-to-mid Anthropocene the track from organic life back into inorganic matter has multiplied, inverted, and de-differentiated. One not only transforms into the other, but each is displaced by the other as a complementary form of embodiment: robotics, molecular engineering, synthetic biology, various implants, tissue and organ transplantation, sensory augmentation, avant-garde pharmaceuticals, and so forth. For some this designed promiscuity between the organic and inorganic at the scale of the organism may be a kind of living death. The species can’t wait to die and reabsorbed by the inorganic, and so the individual organism takes these actions preemptively upon itself. By mixing organic and inorganic material into new composites in the laboratory, it introduces death into life. On the other hand, these technological displacements of life and matter may signal something more than diverted necromancy (or generalized necrotizing fasciitis at industrial scale) they may signal a desire to innovate upon the mammalian diagram, perhaps in the accidental interests of a biopolitics—far more eccentricly than its participants realize. However, at the same time, these disciplines of machine intelligence may, in practice if not in theory, close off rather than open up the wider project of warm alien distortion, as these initiatives are couched within rhetorics and institutions of medical progress. Nevertheless, below are just a few trace-effects that might suggest both perspectives at once. These are a few of my favorite things.



6.

Epidermal Biopolitics and Nanoskin. We have a good sense of the passage from the Foucauldian disciplinary biopolitics for which bodies are captured, enveloped, individuated, nominated, and enumerated into a governable interior, into the Deleuzian “society of control” for which open fields of interfaces, switches, and gateways quantify the traces and trails of partial subjects in motion as they pace through urban landscapes, wandering without tether because there is no outside to which they might escape. Now another regime appears, one that organizes its biopolitical governance through a more immediate and affective means: the sensing and codification of risk at the level of skin (a mammal’s largest sensory organ, a cell’s essential structural support, a planet’s most exposed inventory of life). This epidermal biopolitics is based less on “seeing like a state” than upon what a governing apparatus can sense. That sensing may work toward the comprehensive quantification of carbon, CO2, particulate matter, or heat, as it does for the network of satellite and terrestrial sensors that comprise the proposed Planetary Skin infrastructure as pioneered by Cisco and NASA.9 Here, ecopolitics and global governance bypass the securitization of human populations in favor of the ubiquitous sensing and analysis of molecules of interest and their residual patterns.

Elsewhere, police action is focused on thermodynamic human skin, as demonstrated by the chase for Suspect #2 after the Boston Marathon bombings, he was discovered by heat-seeking technologies that disclosed his warm animal profile hidden beneath layers of urban fabric. For all of us, intercity movement by airplane requires that we submit our own skin, and the surfaces of our possessions, to the guaranteeing scan that can prove that they bear no telltale dust of dangerous chemicals and compounds. We have our person observed by full-body scanners which unconceal the mobile subject from his outer clothing (not nude, but ultranude). To explore this (with due perversity), my Center for Design and Geopolitics worked in collaboration with the Laboratory for Bionanoengineering (both at the University of California, San Diego) to develop applications for inks (and in this case, a wall paint) that could detect ambient particulate trace elements of chemicals commonly used in improvised explosive devices. With microelectronics embedded in the paint itself, the interior building skin becomes a sensor technology, no longer furtive like the panoptic gaze but now fully disclosed as an ambient technology coating the outer skin of the habitat itself. Epidermal biopolitics suggests a strong interweaving of organic and inorganic bodies according to strategies of risk mitigation, but also unforeseeable modes of communication between unlike bodies which can extend, modify, and prostheticize their most all-encompassing sensory media (epidermal sensation) in ways that were until now only possible for vision and audition.

Cloud Polis. Drawing lines upon a planet, either by the physical inscription of walls and envelopes or by the virtual geometries of massless legal borders, is essential to anthropic politics. (Think Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth), and the multiplication and confusion of these drawings by planetary-scale computational architectures puts into play jurisdictional designations and subdivisions, or the refusal of same, and points toward unfamiliar models of geopolitical design and designation.10 We see how global Cloud computing platforms can delaminate normative Westphalian political geography and introduce another, asymptotic sovereign layer on top of the State’s territories. This is seen perhaps most directly in the ongoing Sino-Google conflicts, that began in 2008. As States become Cloud-based entities, conversely Cloud platforms take on some of the most essential technologies of governance, like legal identity, currency, cartography, and platform allegiance. The Cloud Polis suggests weird, thickened, plural geographies and non-contiguous jurisdictions, mixing aspects of US superjurisdiction over both Cloud (Pirate Bay, Megaupload) and State space (customs screening in overseas airports, extraordinary rendition) with aspects of the Charter Cities which would carve new partially privatized polities from the whole cloth of de-sovereign lands.

The Cloud Polis extracts revenue from the cognitive capital of its user-citizens, who trade attention and microeconomic compliance for global infrastructural services. It provides each of them with a discrete online identity and a license to use that infrastructure (not unlike hukou licenses in China that dictate who may and who may not formally partake of urban systems). These embryonic accomplishments of planetary-scale computation comprehensively incorporate information across multiple scales, as well as redraw political territory in its own image point toward an increasing universal acceleration, centralization, and recombination of material flows than those of pedestrian neoliberalism (and conceivably not so dissimilar from the past dreams of communist cyberneticians.)11 In time, perhaps at the eclipse of the Anthropocene, the historical phase of “Google Gosplan” gives way to State-less platforms for multiple strata of synthetic intelligence and networks of outlandish biocommunication to settle into new continents of cyborg symbiosis. Or perhaps instead, if nothing else, the carbon and energy appetite of this embryonic ecology will starve its host before it can fully gestate.

Machinic Images. Any discussion of an accelerationist geopolitical aesthetic must account for the contemporary technologies of the image itself. Taking the long view, we see that humans’ externalized expression of visual ideas dates at least to the primordial architectures of the cave wall. Much later, it passed through a relatively short painting-photo-cinematic phase (lasting a few centuries, give or take) for which individual images and image-sequences were produced, distributed, and appreciated as rare artifactual events. Now and for the foreseeable future, images are a sub-genre of machines. Like the images on paper money, which appear as they do in order to best support specific counterfeit-prevention technologies designed into the patterns, some images (such as my explosives-sensing image noted above) have a discrete technical capacity that is inextricable from their materiality as images. Everyday data visualization turns the diagrammatic image into a scientific, managerial, and military instrument, while pervasive GUIs (graphical user interfaces) turn similar diagrams into active, goal-directed tools that mediate between a human folk psychology of action and algorithms available in the user’s environment. Beyond this, GUIs also train thought toward certain regimes of interpretation of that environment, and as GUIs become more closely glued to direct perception (as for augmented reality), their capacity to engender strong theological interpretations for their users will prove irresistible to various fundamentalisms. In this, the machinic image is punctured by little sinkholes between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real.

On a global scale, the machinic quality of the image is also partially a function of machinic quantity. With the comparatively instantaneous adoption of mobile devices (Turing complete machine + camera + homing tether + telephonic voice relay), we have seen an explosion in the absolute volume of images of the world, dwarfing the total sum produced before the mobile phone appeared in our hands. Unlike images of the painting-photo-cinematic era, these images do not pass into an archive only after their practical life is passed; rather, through global image apps and platforms, they are produced through the archive itself, socialized through the archive, assigned searchable metadata through the archive. As a consequence, the general image apparatus is slowly accumulating a comprehensive chronicle of human visual experience that will be of enormous value to future artificial intelligences. This may be its most durable purpose and its true responsibility. Even today, each user in the Android population (for example) is a node in a vast, massively distributed supercomputing sensing, seeing, tracking, and sorting platform. As for image content, the so-called “New Aesthetic” suggests the possibility of an Art (if that is the right word) that is made not only by artificial vision machines generating their own autonomous aesthetic, but eventually an Art for such intelligences, which can appreciate it uniquely and perhaps develop their own taste genres of M2M (machine-to-machine) connoisseurship.


The Reids of Phoenix, Urbanium Pavilion by architects Kossman.dejong. Shanghai World Expo 2010. Photo courtesy of the author.

Mereotopological Geopolitical Architectonics. As suggested above, an accelerationist “politics” is perhaps premised on a contradiction, in that one of the first things to dissolve is perhaps the coherency of any normative polis or polity. Not only is the forum of public representation torqued out of shape by multiple overlapping geometries of geography, but in mid-free fall, the representable political body doesn’t endure long enough for its polity to take shape (and certainly not for swift decay into recidivist parliamentarism). However, that failure may be the key accomplishment of accelerationist “politics” as an epistemology of Design. The accelerationist geopolitical brief is better assigned the exploration of how certain control systems, certain platform systems, and specific mereotopological configurations work toward particular governmental effects. We wish to amplify the sort of preemptive politico-infrastructural speculation that Shaviro identifies, and particularly those that are premised on an encounter with inhuman exteriorities, and manage to avoid sentimental relapse into the “intuitive values” of Industrial humanism. For example, the architecture of Hernan Diaz Alonso suggests (in ways he himself wouldn’t likely ever claim) how the eclipse of Anthropocenic systems doesn’t suppose that they are necessarily actually erased, but that they become bound within other hosts (perhaps many layers deep, parasites within parasites within parasites) and that, instead of withdrawing into a purified phenomenal geometry, any building-form must presume contagion between its own goopy, hungry, post-animalian composition and other organic and inorganic agents (both symbiots and parasites). Through this, “polities” emerge.

Simultaneously along another track, Alisa Andrasek’s use of autonomous computational agents to find and deform real and virtual matter provides a corrective to the closed “systems thinking” of the Parametricism reigning within architectural, and points to a far less deterministic career for algorithmic thought and design. Unlike entropic gray-goo replibots, these agents constitute an open-ended technology both for prototyping more heterogeneous profiles for real chemical matter than those naturally given, and for how they can organize a geopolitical substrate for compositional action and replication. For both Diaz Alonso and Andrasek, architecture doesn’t represent a political organization through symbolization or monumentalization, but rather directly configures its mediating anatomy. These model geometries are immanent prototypes—rendered in 1:1000 and 1000:1 scales, both at once—for the real infrastructures of post-Anthropocenic geography. Properly deployed (someday), they are less figurations upon the affective “experience” of the world as it is, or as it may come to be, than they are larval variations for estranged worlds and orthogonal futurities. In this, the space of distinction between political and aesthetic registers is unwound, as the Design explorations of this (extremely minoritarian) architecture are not epiphenomenal envelopes for geopolitical thought, drawings on behalf of its potential development. They are geopolitical thought in its most direct, compressed expression.

Some Concluding Remarks

No discussion of an accelerationist geopolitical aesthetic (or of the partial inventory above set in relationship to the post-Anthropocene) can or should develop without passage into the life and afterlife of Anthropocenic Capitalism, particularly with regard to planetary-scale computation as its onto-financial substrate and circulatory system. There is no viable engagement with Capitalism vis-à-vis the post-Anthropocene that is either doctrinally rejectionist or crypto-theologically affirmationist. (Such monophonic zealotries abound, but they do not qualify as viable.) A full discussion is not possible here, but suffice to say that the zigzagging archaeology of “cybernetic” communisms would suggest that the politico-economic phase space of the post-Anthropocene is wide enough and weird enough that intimacies with Algorithmic Capitalism should not provoke the prohibition of experiments. Futural outcomes like Cosmopolitan sovereignty, mondialisation, and “a certain reason to come” are really much more macabre things than they might appear to the delicate tastes and slight constitutions of Deconstruction. They will not arrive as numinous ethical communities of truth and reconciliation, but as amputated limbs, zombie landfills, and falsified laboratory results.

Distinctions between “good” and “bad” accelerationism, such as between the “Promethean vs. political” (for Ray Brassier) or the “dromological vs. the universal” (for Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek), serve the important purpose of demanding a proper telescoping from the local conceptual and machinic conditions of anthropometric speed (the sort that so scandalizes Virilio) to the wider vistas of geologic time, and to a vigilance to never confuse one for the other. But for the purposes of actually constructing geopolitical aesthetics, I would hope that the partial inventory of trace-effects above would go some warding any gnostic tendency within broadly related discourses that would ground these distinctions, implicitly or explicitly, as a privileging of an accelerationism of the conceptual over an accelerationism of the material: of Philosophy purified from encounters with Design. This is because Design does the work of both conceptualization and materialization at once, one oscillating into the other at their own rhythms. To be sure, the futurity of those rhythms is at stake and in jeopardy (a point that some of the other contributors to this special issue will take pains to articulate). But once again, precisely because the futurity of Algorithmic Capitalism and its own schedule for linear acceleration should never be confused with macroscopic undulations of biochemistry, topographic momentum, and universal debris, the poverty of our future is not a poverty of the future. Instead of locating the post-Anthropocene after the Anthropocene along some dialectical timeline, it is better conceived as a composite parasite nested inside the host of the present time, evolving and appearing in irregular intervals at a scale that exceeds the Eros/Thanatos economy of the organism.

Perhaps the existential risk inherent in this situation (a precarious parasitism between the present and the future that could bend either way) might, for some, disqualify a priori an accelerationist geopolitical aesthetic as both too overcoded by hegemonic algorithmic logics and too conditional to pilot the present moment. I think, however, that in the long run this misses the larger point, and betrays some uncertainty as to whether or not Capitalism actually will implode in time (a different question than whether the Anthropocene will: it will). Put another way, how anthropic is Algorithmic Capitalism, really? Apparent correlations between the open wound of a post-planetary General Economy on the one hand, and planetary-scale computation on the other, range from direct correspondence (in which Capitalism is an inhuman machine from the future only provisionally involved with humans) to indirect indifference (in which arcane, apathetic, chthonic forces will, in time, make good their revenge). These are both perfectly good perches from which to survey the plots below, each wisely crafted with a different pet nihilism. If anything, it is the machinic inhumanity of Capitalism, not its anthropocentricity, that most strongly recommends it, and that requires more care on our part to better realize. What mathematician Giuseppe Longo calls “the next machine,” the one that comes after Computation, and whose processes might then provide metaphors and epistemologies of life, thought, and systems, just as computers do today, will also involve, by definition, “the next economics.” We assume that neither of these (the next machine or the next economics) is likely to arrive without the other one in tow. Whether they can or will or should arrive to “us” or for “us” is a different matter. They may arrive only when we are exhumed, by some unthinkable descendant, as speechless mineralized fossils. Or maybe faster than that, if we hasten them.

×
kelley
 
Posts: 613
Joined: Wed Mar 07, 2007 8:49 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

“Accelerationist Aesthetics” | Gean Moreno

Postby Allegro » Wed Sep 11, 2013 1:04 am

Good thread, everyone, and thanks to stillrobertpaulsen!

I spent about two hours reading a second time, very slowly, the piece just above—thanks, kelley—while also reading this editorial, which was helpful in some ways because I wanted to replace ideas of art for ideas of music or its performance.

_________________
Editorial—“Accelerationist Aesthetics” | Gean Moreno

    Where did the critical tradition of art go? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Because we know the answer. It went into spectacle. It went into finance. It got privatized, democratized, scrutinized, defunded, bureaucratized, then professionalized. The critical stick became a seductive carrot. But maybe we don’t have to see this only in terms of a fall from grace. Maybe this is the time for a long-overdue realism that an art field still in the thrall of modernist humanism struggles to avoid recognizing. Isn’t it strange how we are subjected to the most extreme aspects of this new order and yet still suppress its most emergent qualities? What if we suspend the guilt of lapsed certainties and good-person compulsions for just a moment and take a look in the mirror? What would we see? We might see velocity-driven psychotics ravaged and dragged through sky and sludge, crying from revolution teargas and boring discussions at the same time. We might see uneducated beasts using their own bodies to mash culture with physics with economics with mysticism. We might see a strange new form of human tumble out. For the Summer 2013 issue of e-flux journal, we are very pleased to present Gean Moreno’s guest-edited issue on accelerationist aesthetics. Read it at the beach!

    —Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

    The entrenchment of neoliberal fundamentalism has been accompanied by a desire to save whatever critical edge art production can still muster. This has become increasingly pressing as art becomes decor for the offices of hedge fund managers, and as the art world—as David Graeber put it somewhere—mutates into “an appendage to finance capitalism.” The urgency to maintain a critical edge has manifested itself variously: in a turn toward post-autonomia theories that shed light on the position of the cultural producer within a post-Fordist regime of labor; in the production of artifacts that engage reflexively with the conditions of production, display, and circulation in the art world; in recovery operations that target particular legacies, such as those of politicized Conceptual art and structuralist or essayistic filmmaking; in interventionist efforts that leave behind the commercial circuits of art presentation altogether and attempt to work in the social field itself. The common aim of all these efforts amounts to approaching concrete conditions soberly, to being analytical and measured. A subtractive logic is the general animating force: take away—subjective imprint, gratuitous ornament, traces of skill, commercial viability, ambivalent postures, ideological residue, and so forth—until a potent and probing, if often flat-footed, proposal crystallizes.

    Past the edges of the art world, however, where the condition of privilege doesn’t haunt every gesture with the possibility of contradiction, less “sober” engagements with the social are awake and on the prowl. There may still be a line of thinking excited by subtraction and formal rigor, but it is pitted against a proliferation of delirious and maximalist redeployments of pop culture: salvage-punk fantasy literature that probes obliquely, through gasoline fumes and/or unapologetic and slimy monsters, points of resistance to late capitalism and residual anthropocentric nostalgia; hauntological sonic archeology that calls up utopian traces often muffled by electronic music, using the latter’s digital methods of production; B movies that are jacked into the symptomatology of attention deficit disorders as a way to point to the incessant modulations that subjectivity suffers through in control societies; novels written and impossible buildings dreamt in code-language that has mutated like a virus and swallowed the antibodies deployed to eradicate it; soundings of the strange new territories—abyssal drops for a self now revealed as not actually there in the way we had thought—that neuroscience is carving open and sci-fi is mainlining onto its pages; board-game strategizing adjusted to new transnational networks and transformed, through the prism of “Total Design,” into geopolitical planning for the future. The gleefully overloaded and hyperactive artifacts that result often feel less handicapped than art objects that are safely ensconced in cultural institutions when attempting to cognitively and affectively mapping the spaces and forces of transnational capitalism. Perhaps these hyperactive artifacts can even begin to map a hard-to-imagine Outside beyond transnational capitalism.

    One of the strands that participates in this revved-up deployment of forms is what has been called “accelerationist aesthetics,” even if the precise traits that establish its parameters and the full range of products that constitute it may still need to be determined. The name was suggested by Steven Shaviro in his book Post-Cinematic Affect. It derives from a political program—accelerationism—which comes down from the Deleuze and Guattari of Anti-Oedipus and the Lyotard of Libidinal Economy, and which finds its most virulent and seductive expression in the texts that British philosopher Nick Land began producing in the 1980s.

    The term “accelerationism” was first coined by Benjamin Noys in his book The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory, as way to designate this tendency and the political praxis it suggested. Shaviro, in turn, drew a distinction between an accelerationist politics or praxis, and an accelerationist aesthetics. As a politics, in the version that comes filtered through the writings of Nick Land, accelerationism has been taken to task by a number of theorists, including Ray Brassier, Alberto Toscano, Noys, and Shaviro himself. However, as it is being questioned and bashed, there is a parallel effort afoot to think accelerationism beyond the boundaries that were established for it by Land et al. Reza Negarestani, Alex Williams, Nick Snirneck, and Benjamin Singleton, among others, have been looking for ways around the shortfalls and blindsides of an early accelerationism, generating new ways to think through it, employing it less as a drive toward meltdown than a cunning practice through which to capture and redeploy existing energies and platforms in the service of a re-universalized left politics.

    Although often disparaged as a political program, accelerationism, which early on performed its ideas most notably through carefully crafted theory-fictions, has always had a robust aesthetic side. It is here, in both a seductive performative dimension (which spills into the everyday experiential field) and in the affective range of these aesthetics—which ran for a time parallel to an emerging cyberpunk, a fertile moment in electronic music and Cronenbergean flesh-melts, and now begin to link up with interfacial skins, data avalanches, predictive modeling at substantial scale and the like—that we may find what sustains the desire to keep accelerationism around even if some remain weary of it (or one of its versions) as political theory or praxis.

    Despite Shaviro’s effort to define it, the notion of an accelerationist aesthetics remains an open problem, suggestively bubbling with, on the one hand, the potential to provoke innovative cartographic exercises that probe unprecedented social complexity and look for new liberatory programs that live up to it, and on the other hand, dark intimations that this aesthetics is indissoluble from the drive to deliberately exacerbate nihilistic meltdowns as the only response to being dragged by the vertiginous speeds of a runaway capitalism. It is working through the impasse between these two extremes—and, more often than not, assuming the first at the expense of the second—that fuels a number of the texts in this issue of e-flux journal. The essays respond to two sets of questions:

    What constitutes an accelerationist aesthetics? Is it possible? Why would it matter? What should its scope be? And whose interest would it serve? Does such an aesthetics, if possible or desirable, have anything to offer an art production exhausted with sober formalisms and critique-based models that increasingly spin in place, taking ineffective aim at the very protocols and institutions that allow them to exist in the first place and that provide the infrastructure for their sustainability?

    Bound to these questions is a desire to turn the horizon that currently sets the coordinates of what is deemed of importance or value in art production into a porous border from which we can, through pendular sweeps, reach out to adjacent neighborhoods of thought and production and bring back fertile material. The returns on a model deeply invested in critique, as it has been structured within the art world, seem to dwindle at an alarming rate in the face of social and economic relations that everywhere eat away at whatever autonomy the cultural field ever had, or ever dreamed of. The very space of possibility that this model once ushered in with such force seems to have been foreclosed upon. Surely there are efforts still articulating themselves out there, refusing the institution and its co-opting logic no less than the market and its logic, sounding potential alternatives or prefigurations of a different world. But, barring full conversion into activism, these interventionist art exercises seem increasingly pushed to the cusp of having to default on their promise.

    The anxiety to shake things up, in light of the disaster of a vanishing critical dimension, has to boil over into something concrete at some point, and this, at least from where I’m standing, demands a lateral move through the horizon that currently determines the conditions in which art production is allowed to unfold. It demands probing expeditions into other spaces, into terrains from where the other side of what we are currently inside may begin to take shape. And it demands the sharpening of robust synthesizing conceptual tools to engage in fruitful cross-fades and appropriations. This issue of e-flux journal is one of these probing expeditions.

    ×
    © 2013 e-flux and the author
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
_________________
User avatar
Allegro
 
Posts: 4456
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2010 1:44 pm
Location: just right of Orion
Blog: View Blog (144)

Thick Skin, a lawful film

Postby Allegro » Wed Sep 11, 2013 1:09 am

Edit. I have moved what was originally a post in this thread to the hauntology thread where it should've been, in my way of thinking.
Last edited by Allegro on Wed Sep 11, 2013 10:05 am, edited 2 times in total.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
_________________
User avatar
Allegro
 
Posts: 4456
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2010 1:44 pm
Location: just right of Orion
Blog: View Blog (144)

Re: The Next Ten Billion Years

Postby minime » Wed Sep 11, 2013 1:22 am

Nonetheless, it so happens that a few atoms that are currently part of your brain, as you read these words, will also be part of the brain-analogue of the creature on the crag on that distant, not-yet-existing world. Does that fact horrify you, intrigue you, console you, leave you cold? We’ll discuss the implications of that choice next week.


Truly mindbending stuff, and way, way, way beyond my potential.

Kervran would say that the atoms aren't likely to make it either.
User avatar
minime
 
Posts: 1095
Joined: Sun Aug 18, 2013 2:01 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Water in the Anthropocene + Ambient Version

Postby Allegro » Thu Sep 12, 2013 1:16 pm

I’ve added the ambient version for this post.


^ Water in the Anthropocene | Vimeo notes
Music | “Subsequent Reality” by Earlyguard, “Sense of Latent Power” by Jana Winderen

    WIKI excerpt | The Anthropocene is an informal geologic chronological term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems. The term was coined recently by ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer and has been widely popularized by the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, who regards the influence of human behavior on the Earth’s atmosphere in recent centuries as so significant as to constitute a new geological epoch for its lithosphere. To date, the term has not been adopted as part of the official nomenclature of the geological field of study.


^ Water in the Anthropocene (Ambient Version)
Music | “Subsequent Reality” by Earlyguard, “Sense of Latent Power” by Jana Winderen
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
_________________
User avatar
Allegro
 
Posts: 4456
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2010 1:44 pm
Location: just right of Orion
Blog: View Blog (144)

Re: The Next Ten Billion Years

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Sep 12, 2013 6:19 pm

Searcher08 » Tue Sep 10, 2013 6:34 am wrote:Thank you for that wonderful, enthralling piece of mind-food!
I much preferred Greer's piece to the one he referenced.

One of the things which surprised me most about both pieces was the lack of the effect of ETI contact. Systems always tend to be more impacted by the larger syste in which they are embedded than is assumed - and I was reminded by the Chilbolton 'warning' crop-circle which appeared to be from an A.I. / silicon based intelligence.

Am really into scenario planning (it's origins are fascinating) and the importance of Causal Textures, where it is not just broadly 'good' and bad', but also ones that are subject to extreme discontinuity (eg the appearence of a WorldWideWeb) and to great ambiguity (ie the equivalent of being in 'fog')...


I preferred Greer's piece to Bardi's too. However, one thing Bardi's had going for it that I found fascinating was the evolution and expansion of artificial intelligence to the point that eventually they were able to manipulate the ellipses of entire planets. Under this scenario, perhaps AI is the avenue through which we might possibly become interstellar ETI.

But not intergalactic, however. Strange that the one thing Greer and Bardi's piece had in common: no Mr. Fusion for the DeLorean!
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
User avatar
stillrobertpaulsen
 
Posts: 2414
Joined: Wed Jan 14, 2009 2:43 pm
Location: California
Blog: View Blog (37)

For whom?

Postby Allegro » Sun Sep 15, 2013 2:47 pm

stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Sep 12, 2013 5:19 pm wrote:... But not intergalactic, however. Strange that the one thing Greer and Bardi's piece had in common: no Mr. Fusion for the DeLorean!
Exactly.

I can’t let go of this thread. Most everything I’ve read and listened to, during the last maybe 72 hours, has been wrapped in experimental :lol: hauntology. I’m still exploring, here, and it’s embarrassing how Eurocentric I still am.

In how many years, due to any number of reasons, will diminished energy sources, for example, sunlight, inhibit the manufacture of pianos, violins and other acoustic musical instruments; and, in how many years will diminished energy sources inhibit performances on electric guitars and amplifiers, speakers, microphones, electronic pianos, well, anything electronic used for making and listening to music; and, in how many years will diminished energy sources inhibit repair of concert and recital halls, theaters, museums for performances in and around them, or outdoor concerts, or highways and lighted paths to them, we mustn’t omit; and, in how many years will diminished energy sources inhibit most things that electricity or solar power had provided for those who must make music?

I’m guessing humans who’ve acclimated to all things electrical will have to consider singing, dancing, whistling, clapping accompanied by finger tapping and palm beating sand on beaches, hollow vines and trunks; whatever they’ll make for drums, they’ll beat with sticks, all of which will be included in New :) Planetary Fine Arts!

Those ideas were already considered before Lord Balto motivated me to write them.
Lord Balto » Sun Sep 15, 2013 7:06 am wrote:...Such notions as the Golden Age, Atlantis, Eden, etc. all appear to be dim memories of the very end of the last of these periods, circa 2950 BC. My own research (see my Typhonian History of the World, especially the chapter on the flood story), would indicate that the cause of the last major event was cosmic in nature, but I would suggest that the larger the population and the more complex the society, the more difficult it is for that society to survive a global catastrophe. This goes especially for such technological "solutions" as solar energy, where the entire civilization would be dependent upon clear skies and unobstructed sunlight, whereas as recently as AD 536, the sun was reduced to shining rather dimly for 4 hours a day over a period of more than a year.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
_________________
User avatar
Allegro
 
Posts: 4456
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2010 1:44 pm
Location: just right of Orion
Blog: View Blog (144)

Anthropocene: the exhibition

Postby Allegro » Thu Sep 26, 2013 11:14 pm

Highlights mine. Additional resources at the bottom of this post.

_________________
Anthropocene: the exhibition | 2 pp. pdf
[Exhibition was held 25-26 January 2013]

    Curators from the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany discuss an upcoming exhibition that will present geology and environmental issues to the public and encourage the scientific community to get involved in the project.

    The Anthropocene has emerged as a popular term used by scientists and the media to partition the current phase of Earth’s history. The concept suggests that the scale of human impact on the planet has become so great that the collective action of the species will be found in the geological record. Currently there is an Anthropocene working group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy who are preparing a proposal to the International Commission on Stratigraphy to have the period formalised. The proposal is not due until 2016, but before then the Deutsches Museum will hold the Anthropocene Exhibition.

    Although it has antecedents reaching back to the early twentieth century, such as Vernadsky’s ‘Noosphere’, the term Anthropocene has only been in use for over a decade. In 2000, Nobel Prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen described the term and later in the same year gave a further impulse to the concept with a short publication (co-authored with Eugene Stoermer) that appeared in the International Geosphere Biosphere Newsletter. Soon the term was being used in the global change community. In recent years it has spread throughout many disciplines and has struck a chord with many scholars in the humanities, where the concept appears original in its genuine challenge of nature-culture dichotomies. Recently, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, a joint endeavour of Munich’s Ludwig Maximilians Universität and the Deutsches Museum, hosted the conference Culture in the Anthropocene in Munich. The concept has also gained the curiosity of artists and museums looking for creative ways to explain the increasing pervasiveness of humans.

    Understanding that this is both a concept with utility for science and public engagement, the Deutsches Museum has embarked upon the Anthropocene Exhibition to be opened in October 2014. The exhibition team is working on taking the concept from a complex assemblage of academic insights into a collection to showcase to the public. At this stage in the planning process we can offer a few insights into the exhibition.

    The exhibition

    The current scale of environmental issues demands that scientists and policy makers reach the public on as wide a platform as possible. Over its long history the Deutsches Museum has sought to be one of the sites to engage the public with science and technology. From the beginning of the museum, its founder Oskar von Miller and supporters like the engineer Rudolph Diesel wanted to communicate to society “the great masterworks of the natural sciences and technology”. With global industrialisation and mechanisation influencing more areas of the planet, the associated changes have reached previously unimaginable dimensions and dynamics. With this, the role of the museum has also been challenged. In a survey of patrons we found that eighty percent of those interviewed wanted the museum to engage with controversial topics.

    The exhibition will visualise the history, present and future of the Anthropocene. It will also display the deep interventions of humans into the geo- and biosphere over the last two centuries. It will not, however, be conceptualised as a history of decline, but as a complex story of destruction and shaping. Science and technology based concepts of transformation are not only to blame for past mistakes, but offer some of the greatest potential in moving towards a sustainable economy and society. Accepting that we are now living in the Anthropocene is not a move towards anthropocentricism but an attempt to overcome the dualism between humans and nature; this philosophical challenge is an equally important thread to weave into the exhibition. Topics of the exhibition will include: humankind as destroyer, but also creator and designer; the anthropogenic planet that is shaped and changed by human beings; historically grown consumption patterns and lifestyles; time and space as important factors in the Anthropocene; the future as challenge but also as chance for humankind and its political institutions, social networks and dreams.

    The exhibition’s main goal is to inform visitors about the Anthropocene as a scientific hypothesis and a currently debated vision of the role of humans on Earth. It shows the effects of human intervention as a biological and geological actor, increasing awareness for both temporal and spatial extent of human-invoked environmental changes. By translating the concept into a three-dimensional space, the exhibition offers the general audience a unique opportunity to experience the Anthropocene and learn about the current state of scientific knowledge and ongoing discussions.

    Engaging the geologic

    The exhibition is planned to run for eight months. Accompanying it, will also be a catalogue, an educational program, a lecture and film series and an online exhibition with the exhibition partner, the Rachel Carson Center. The message of the Anthropocene makes significant contribution to the ongoing conversation about the human impact on the planet. At its heart the concept is layered with the sediments of geology and in this way we are planning to have a geological trace that runs throughout the exhibition. We would like to engage with as many scholars in the Earth sciences as possible and the curatorial team invites interested scientists who would like to contribute their knowledge to the formation of the exhibition to contact us with comments and suggestions. The Anthropocene Exhibition is set to be an original and important endeavour that brings transdisciplinary scientific knowledge about the ‘age of humans’ to the public.

    For further information contact the project manager Nina Möllers and check the exhibition website.

_________________
Additional resources.
http://www.egu.eu/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_ ... nces_Union
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
_________________
User avatar
Allegro
 
Posts: 4456
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2010 1:44 pm
Location: just right of Orion
Blog: View Blog (144)

Anthropocene: Nature and Technology in the Age of Humans

Postby Allegro » Thu Sep 26, 2013 11:16 pm

Edited to choose better words for the intro.

_________________
While the OP is the art of story telling in text forms, the excerpt below describes how Anthropocene stories were told with the use of visual arts, performance arts (film, multimedia) and performing arts.

_________________
Anthropocene: Nature and Technology in the Age of Humans
4 pp. pdf
Rachel Carson Center | 25-26 January 2013, Deutsches Museum, Munich

< excerpt begin >

    Engagement, as we saw at the workshop, is also about telling stories that break us out of our comfort zone. This is the case for film and multimedia, where new communication technologies coupled with advances in data visualization can have an especially strong impact. SEBASTIAN BÜTTNER’S interactive film The Day it Rained Forever is a dystopian story that crosses a number of media platforms to engage viewers. BENJAMIN HENNIG’S cartograms redraw the world and make people “look again” at the globe they thought they knew. And OWEN GAFFNEY’S film Welcome to the Anthropocene, which has since gone viral on the internet, was shown at the opening of the UN Rio+20 Summit by the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Gaffney’s film begins with the line, “This is the story of one species...”

    Engagement can also be encouraged through art and provocation. Like one of the examples SERAFINE LINDEMAN showed of a business card that gives the phone number of a glacier. Formed out of collaboration with a major telecommunications company, the sound installation allows people to telephone a glacier in Tyrol, Austria to hear it melt. The diorama “Natural Habitat” presented by HEIKE SCHUPPELIUS is another example. Installed at Berlin Museum für Naturkunde, it shows a dancer performing a drama about the human interaction with nature; the installation challenged the traditional presentation of stagnant natural history objects. Added to this would also be the “Nano Supermarket” that HENDRIK-JAN GRIEVINK presented to the workshop. The “supermarket” is actually a bus traveling around Europe showing the future possibilities of nanofood technology in a humorous, if not ironic, and consumable installation.

< excerpt end >
Last edited by Allegro on Fri Sep 27, 2013 3:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
_________________
User avatar
Allegro
 
Posts: 4456
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2010 1:44 pm
Location: just right of Orion
Blog: View Blog (144)

Welcome to the Anthropocene | The Human Epoch

Postby Allegro » Thu Sep 26, 2013 11:16 pm

http://youtu.be/h8S4nrTzCwE

^ Welcome to the Anthropocene | The Human Epoch
Uploaded Sep 21, 2013
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
_________________
User avatar
Allegro
 
Posts: 4456
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2010 1:44 pm
Location: just right of Orion
Blog: View Blog (144)

Re: The Next Ten Billion Years

Postby Luther Blissett » Wed Jan 07, 2015 2:43 pm

I searched for this animation for about an hour last night before giving up, and had to enlist a coworker to find it for me today.

The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
User avatar
Luther Blissett
 
Posts: 4990
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:31 pm
Location: Philadelphia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Next Ten Billion Years

Postby Pele'sDaughter » Wed Jan 07, 2015 5:23 pm

That was amazing. Thanks for making sure we got to see it. :yay
Don't believe anything they say.
And at the same time,
Don't believe that they say anything without a reason.
---Immanuel Kant
User avatar
Pele'sDaughter
 
Posts: 1917
Joined: Thu Sep 13, 2007 11:45 am
Location: Texas
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Next Ten Billion Years

Postby jakell » Wed Jan 07, 2015 5:41 pm

Searcher08 » Tue Sep 10, 2013 11:34 am wrote:Thank you for that wonderful, enthralling piece of mind-food!
I much preferred Greer's piece to the one he referenced.

One of the things which surprised me most about both pieces was the lack of the effect of ETI contact. Systems always tend to be more impacted by the larger syste in which they are embedded than is assumed - and I was reminded by the Chilbolton 'warning' crop-circle which appeared to be from an A.I. / silicon based intelligence.

Am really into scenario planning (it's origins are fascinating) and the importance of Causal Textures, where it is not just broadly 'good' and bad', but also ones that are subject to extreme discontinuity (eg the appearence of a WorldWideWeb) and to great ambiguity (ie the equivalent of being in 'fog')...


I think that Greer avoids this for a specific reason, and that is that he is examining our attitudes to being part of a closed loop. The series at the time (on religion)**, is looking at how we see ourselves in relation to the future, and how various favoured 'shapes of time' colour our image of ourselves as a species (continued progress, apocalypse, fall and rise etc).
Adding aliens into the mix would throw some more ghosts into this particular machine.

**In other words, you gotta read the series to appreciate the context. It starts 27 March 2013 and goes on for just over 40 weeks, I really recommend it.
" Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism"
User avatar
jakell
 
Posts: 1821
Joined: Wed May 06, 2009 4:58 pm
Location: North England
Blog: View Blog (0)

Next

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 47 guests