June 2013
14 posts
“… the future will be the product of both advances in knowledge that we cannot predict, and collective action that we have an active hand in shaping. Thus the most salient aspect of my speculation for the present lies in the political dimension, of egalitarian versus hierarchical politics. Economic and political changes over the past few decades have rendered increasing numbers of people economically contingent or superfluous, from the perspective of the owners of capital. It is up to mass movements to develop the capacity to demand redistribution and to contest the nature of work.”
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—Peter Frase
Peter Frase is an editor of Jacobin and a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Ashwin Parameswaran writes about resilience in economics, ecology, technology, and other complex systems. They will debate the future of work, technological unemployment, and the universal basic income.
The debate is a part of Triple Canopy’s Speculations (“The future is___”), fifty days of lectures, discussions, and debates about the future in EXPO 1: New York.
“The future can only be a parable for the present. (This is the view of a writer of fiction.) Futures imagined in the present take the form of “If this goes on…” or “If only we could…” We strive to correct abuses or erase injustice or correct error because if this goes on our world will become unlivable. If only we could practice justice and mercy and good sense starting now, we would in time create a world that embodies them.”
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John Crowley is the author of novels and volumes of short fiction, including the famed fantasy novel Little, Big. He will join us June 10 at 2pm for a seminar on the prophetic work of Norman Bel Geddes, designer of the Futurama. At 4pm, he will describe his own foolproof method for predicting the far-distant world future.
The seminar and lecture are a part of Triple Canopy’s Speculations (“The future is___”), fifty days of lectures, discussions, and debates about the future in EXPO 1: New York.
“I am generally wary of the demand for ‘likeability’ in fiction, which I think is a bastardisation of the demand of identification – itself something of a suspect notion. There should be characters and situations that we cannot identify with, that retain either too much horror or too much wonder to allow for simple identification. That feels to me like an accurate depiction of what it is like to be in the world, rather than a neutered register of continual empathy.”
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From novelist Katie Kitamura’s interview with We Love This Book.
Kitamura will join Triple Canopy at MoMA PS1 this Friday, June 7th. At 2 p.m. she will draw on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film World on a Wire to consider simulacra as a model for thinking about fiction writing and authorship. At 4 p.m. she will describe a future where languages are traded like currency.
The discussion is a part of Triple Canopy’s Speculations (“The future is___”), fifty days of lectures, discussions, and debates about the future in EXPO 1: New York.
Play
May 2013
29 posts
PODCAST | Critical Language: A Forum on International Art English
A recording of Critical Language, Triple Canopy’s forum on “International Art English,” a widely circulated essay on the relationship between language, legibility, and power in the art world written by Alix Rule and David Levine and published in issue 16. Participants in the forum, which took place in April, included the authors and Wenzel Bilger, Lauren Cornell, Mariam Ghani, Mostafa Heddaya, Alexander Provan, Yael Reinharz, Lumi Tan, and Hrag Vartanian.
In “International Art English,” Rule and Levine, analyze a corpus of press releases circulated by e-flux in order to describe the language of contemporary art. They trace the particularities of this language to English translations of critical texts published in the 1970s in journals like October. The widespread use of the Internet has, they argue, accelerated the development of IAE, turning it into a kind of lingua franca; the proliferation of international variations—French IAE, Scandinavian IAE, Chinese IAE—ends up diluting the authority of critics, “traditionally the elite innovators of IAE.” Given these developments, Rule and Levine ask: “Can we imagine an art world without IAE? Without its special language, would art need to submit to the scrutiny of broader audiences and local ones? Would it hold up?” With this forum, Triple Canopy aimed to provoke a critical response to the article, consider questions and perspectives eschewed by the authors, and solicit the perspectives of those who work with (or resist working with) IAE, whether they are critics, curators, educators, or publicists. Specifically, the discussion focused on the political implications and uses of IAE, within and outside of the art world. How does “critical” language direct attention away from the suppression of political dissent, especially when employed by institutions—and their proxies—operating in environments marred by human-rights violations, such as China and the UAE (or even the US)? How does obfuscation slip into propaganda? And do those who regularly produce IAE experience the language as burdensome or liberating, a welcome tool for the diffusion of power or another step toward a global standard of ambiguity and opacity?
READ RESPONSES BY:
MARTHA ROSLER AND HITO STEYERL IN E-FLUX JOURNAL #45
MARIAM GHANI IN TRIPLE CANOPY
“Students interested in imaging are steered toward computer vision for weapons; ones interested in robots are directed into military drone research… . Engineering education can be seen as the first in a series of filters within professional engineering that systematically remove individuals interested in challenging societal power, or remove the will to challenge from individuals.”
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June 1st at 3pm: Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Mary “Missy” Cummings, and Thomas Keenan will debate the future of drones.
Csikszentmihalyi is an artist working on technologies that rebalance power between citizens, governments, and corporations, and founded and directed the Center for Civic Media at MIT. Cummings is one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots and director of the MIT Humans and Automation Lab. Keenan is director of the Bard Human Rights Project.
The debate is a part of Triple Canopy’s Speculations (“The future is___”), fifty days of lectures, discussions, and debates about the future in EXPO 1: New York.
“I do not know if I have learned enough in the past decade to justify the life I have lived. I have watched, even when I didn’t want to watch. I have written in defence of causes I knew to be hopeless. Of course, at times I have given in to hopelessness when, if only for the sake of victims, perhaps I should have soldiered on. Who hasn’t? The moral test of being an onlooker at other people’s tragedies is one that few of us are likely to pass reliably.”
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—David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis
Today at 3pm at PS1: Journalist David Rieff, author of books on immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism will detail the proposed solutions to the world food crisis, and the serious difficulties with each.
Rieff’s lecture is part of Triple Canopy’s Speculations (“The future is___”), fifty days of lectures, discussions, and debates about the future as part of EXPO 1: New York.
