2018 A series of seminars at Tensta konsthall in collaboration with the Institute for Future Studies, for presentation throughout 2018
Can we be optimistic about the future of the world and mankind? Seldom has this question been so contentious as it is now. On the one hand, infant mortality, poverty and the number of violent crimes and wars in the world have decreased radically, while longevity, literacy, access to education, health care and clean water have increased. On the other hand, we face a serious climate crisis at the same time as several bloody conflicts continue, with consequent untold numbers of people seeking refuge. We are also witnessing a rise in racist and anti-democratic attitudes and movements in many places, and national sovereignty is being challenged by, amongst other things, technological developments that have created new, difficult to decipher infrastructures and new governance structures and processes.
In this lecture series, some of the themes and phenomena that will influence future developments will be discussed. How can democracy survive in a globalised world, where the importance of nation states is declining and technique and communication corporations are gaining more and more influence? Within what time frame do we need to think about “futures”? Do studies of the future need a Copernican turn with less human-centrism and a different conception of intelligence? How are tomorrow’s values affected by the waves of immigrants and new social media? New ways to discriminate against people have been seen recently — how can efforts against such kinds of injustice be reinforced? Does the survival of humankind depend on possibilities to leave our planet and move elsewhere in cosmos?
The seminar series is part of Tensta konsthall’s 20th anniversary.
Tuesday 20 March, 18:30 Metahaven and Benjamin Bratton
Benjamin Bratton: Trump Win + Calif Legal Weed x Universal Secessionism/Withdrawal = Bullish on VR Stocks?
The rise of idiocratic ethno-nationalism in global politics puts many things in question, including the “future” in “design futures”. Design of what and for what? Tomorrowland or Mad Max? It does not, however, change the reality of our systems-scale design problems. While there are many reasons to be suspicious of those whose main entitlement is to stand earnestly against the real, we may do the same for those whose main alibi is simple “futurism”. Among the main reasons is the conventional definition of “the future” as a time ten to fifty years from now. The year 2050 CE is not the future. For systems design we are designing 2050 today, and doing poorly so for the most part. Additionally, the alternative alibi of presentism — that “the real world” requires only the most myopic forms of stakeholder utilitarianism without further abstraction — is precisely what makes the deferral into some future or past even possible in the first place. Presentism and futurism conspire to validate an intuitive sense of cause and effect bound within an autobiographical tempo of life and death. In contrast with the dumb heuristics of human-centered design, we should presume that subjective “user” experiences of cause and effect are flawed, and insufficient for modelling solutions directly, and so we must continue to look elsewhere.
A Copernican turn in design that I would champion focuses on how intelligence is imbued in accumulating layers of material technologies (grammar, the grave, the GPU, etc.) allow successive generations to build on or against them and to automate processes for escaping intuitive and arbitrary cognitive biases, not reinforcing their chauvinisms. The world is a model open to design and designation, not by human mastery and self-reflection over its sovereign domain, but because our planet uses humans to know itself and remake itself. We are the medium, not the message.
Self-presentation: Benjamin H. Bratton's work spans philosophy, art, design and computer science. He is Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. He is Program Director of the Strelka Institute of Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow. He is also a Professor of Digital Design at The European Graduate School and Visiting Faculty at SCI_Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture). Twitter @bratton
In The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2016. 503 pages) Bratton outlines a new theory for the age of global computation and algorithmic governance. He proposes that different genres of planetary scale computation — smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation — can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure that is both a computational infrastructure and a new governing architecture. The book plots an expansive interdisciplinary design brief for The Stack-to-Come. See thestack.org
Metahaven: Skopje’s Megastructure
In 1963, the Macedonian capital of Skopje was hit by a massive earthquake. The Japanese architect and urbanist Kenzō Tange, figurehead of the metabolist movement, was commissioned to design a new master plan for Skopje. The plan was realised, yet never completed. Today, Tange’s megastructure for Skopje lies buried, part in memory, imagination, and possibility. Here and there, his spaceship surfaces as a post office or brutalist housing block.
Since 2014, the Macedonian government has brandished a wave of gold-painted sculptural interventions around the city. Known as the baroquization project, the endeavour was somehow meant to stimulate Skopje’s sense of grandeur and Macedonia’s sense of historical identity in the face of an uncertain future and a dicey geopolitical climate. Is Skopje’s baroquization a “mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror?” Plastic-gold post-internet statues now sit on top of Tange’s hidden megastructure, literally. The white formica dictator chic upholsters the Chandigarh of South-eastern Europe, and this is not an end but just a beginning. Skopje tells us things about the politics of interface — as in the music video of Oneohtrix Point Never — Problem Areas — while during the 2016 US election, in the formerly thriving industrial town of Veles in Central Macedonia, bored teenagers earned tens of thousands of dollars by running pro-Trump fake news websites. There is nothing to worry about. There are only more interfaces than there are eyes. And there is more truth than there is reality. There is no planetary-scale plan for this.
Self-presentation: Founded by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden, Metahaven’s practice spans filmmaking, installation, writing and design to provoke new imaginaries that are equally bound to aesthetics, poetics, and politics. Recent solo presentations include Truth Futurism, Futura, Prague (2017) Information Skies, Auto Italia, London (2016), and Mumbai Art Room, Bombay (2016), The Sprawl, YBCA, San Francisco (2015), Black Transparency, Future Gallery, Berlin (2014), and Islands in the Cloud, MoMA PS1, New York (2013). Recent group exhibitions include the Sharjah Biennial 2017, Sharjah, UAE, Fear & Love, Design Museum, London (2016), Dream Out Loud, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2016), The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?), the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016), All of This Belongs to You, Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2015), Private Settings: Art After the Internet, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (2014), and Frozen Lakes, Artists Space, New York (2013). Recent publications include Black Transparency (2015), Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? (2013), and Uncorporate Identity (2010). Music videos by Metahaven include Home (2014), and Interference (2015), both with musician, composer and artist Holly Herndon, as part of an ongoing collaboration. Metahaven are the designers of Tensta konsthall’s visual communication since 2011. Metahaven’s full-length documentary, The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda), premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2016. Its successor, a short film titled Information Skies, was shot and edited in 2016 and was nominated for the 2017 European Film Awards. Metahaven’s film Possessed (in collaboration with Rob Schröder) premiered at IFFR 2018 and was nominated for a Tiger Award and nominated for the New:Vision award at CPH:DOX 2018 in Copenhagen. Their latest film, Hometown, is yet to be released, it was shot in Beirut and Kyiv in 2017. Twitter: @mthvn. Instagram: @metahaven
Thursday 22 March, 18:30 Karim Jebari and Ahmet Ögut
Karim Jebari: Why Move into Space?
The last human being left the Moon in December 1972. That was 45 years ago, many people at the time thought that humankind was developing towards becoming a multi-planet species. But at that time, to leave our planet’s gravity wells was altogether too expensive for any government to contemplate doing it. Today, thanks to progress within robotics, we have totally new possibilities to establish ourselves on new celestial bodies. Should we try again - and in which case, why? To prevent the demise, the end of humanity? How shall we proceed? And what will be required of future Martians, Mercurians, Titans and Europeans?
Self-presentation: I am a researcher at the Institute for Future Studies, Stockholm. In December 2014, I received my PhD in Philosophy at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). My thesis was on applied ethics, and specifically, on how we should relate to the challenges and possibilities of technological development. I am interested in most matters related to politics, ethics and philosophy. My main interest at present is transhumanism and its existential risks.
Ahmet Ögut: What If the Mechatronic Engineers Are the Artists of Future?
What if mechatronic engineers become more creative and increasingly more productive in the future, or if artists were to develop technical skills to a level that they become mechatronic engineers. What if they create new devices for communication beyond current cell phone technology that emit radiofrequencies, or what if they transform the crime-prediction algorithms into crime-prevention algorithms and abolished all land, sea and sky-based armed forces. What if they develop a system that has equal representation for all of the different ethno-linguistic groups; or subvert the gender binary, or shut down corporations who inject liquid at high pressure into subterranean rocks, or invent a system that cleans particulates, biological molecules and other harmful substances from the atmosphere? I have a problem with utopia seen as something to come in the future which is better than present times. I believe utopia must be emancipated from the future. In order to avoid such dominating conception, I suggest that we find a way to look at the present time properly to establish a profound transformation despite current conflicts, with the question how do we activate our imagination right now and right here?
Tuesday 10 April, 18:30 Bi Puranen and Pontus Strimling
Bi Puranen: To Come to Sweden — Extreme but at the Same Time Moderate: How Can This Go Together?
Amongst the questions that are taken up in my presentation: how do you become accepted in a society which is both extreme and moderate? Why are values and social norms important? What do we know about how values change when people migrate? Who does what, when values conflict with Swedish law? How is confidence in democracy affected by populism and how does populism influence our view of immigration? Human rights as a target.
Self-presentation: Bi Puranen, is a researcher at the Institute for Future Studies, General Secretary for World Values Survey.
Pontus Strimling: Why Liberals are winning the culture war
The culture war refers to the struggle between conservative and liberal values. In the US this struggle has focused on a set of moral issues surrounding sexuality, religion, race, gender and guns. Surveys show a dramatic movement on certain issues (e.g., gay rights), whereas public opinion has barely moved at all on other issues (e.g., abortion rights). If issue positions are categorised as liberal vs. conservative, we can see that the majority of the movement in public opinion has been toward the liberal positions. But why are the liberals winning the cultural war? And why does public opinion move more on some issues than on others?
Self-presentation: My research deals with how cultural traits change over time, particularly how norms are created, sustained and transformed. Throughout my career, I have worked with a range of interdisciplinary collaborators across the field and I have published in anthropology, biology, psychology, mathematics, linguistics, and economy. My goal is to further the understanding of cultural change to the point where it can be used to predict real-world dynamics. To this end, I use formal models to understand and illustrate how macro cultural processes function. These models are informed by data gathered from experiments ensuring that the micro-processes from which the models aggregate their prediction are in line with reality. My work ranges from basic research on the rules surrounding punishment to applied research on why the changing norms of hygiene become stricter.
Thursday 19 April, 18:30: Massimiliano Mollona
Artcommons: On Commoning, Art and Radical Imagination
Art is a force that both freezes and abstracts the flow of life (a movement of enclosure) and puts life in motion (a movement of radical opening.) As we enter into a new era of primitive accumulation, how can art contribute to the double movement of anti-capitalist critique and epistemological and discursive construction of a new post-capitalist imaginary, including new forms of making and representation in which art and politics inform each other?
In this talk I propose the notion of ARTCOMMONS intended as a set of material skills, collaborative practices and prefigurative actions aimed at creating minor and everyday forms of resistance against the radical enclosures of late capitalism. Ultimately, the talk reflects on what does it mean to be human and to exist in commons at a time of extreme political repression and economic dispossession. In the first part of the talk, I discuss the relationships between art and politics since the global neoliberal turn in the 1980s; in the second part, I discuss the Institute of Radical Imagination, a hybrid between an art project, a travelling research centre, a refuge for intellectuals and artists at risk and a policy-making body generating ideas and applied knowledge that responds to specific urgent needs on the ground — an intellectual logistical infrastructure more than a structure, operating across existing arts, academic and activist networks. The aim of the Institute is to implement six steps towards a post-capitalist society also intended as five forms of commoning — of labour, money, space, personhood and knowledge.
Self-presentation: Massimiliano Mollona is a writer, filmmaker and anthropologist. He has a multidisciplinary background in economics and anthropology. His work focuses on the relationships between art and political economy and his practice is situated at the intersection of pedagogy, art and activism. He conducted extensive fieldworks in Italy, UK, Norway and Brazil, mainly in economic institutions, looking at the relationships between economic development and political identity through participatory and experimental film projects. One of Massimiliano’s main research interests is to look at the role of art institutions and cultural organisations in relation to the bio-politics and political economy of late capitalism. Mollona was Director of the Athens Biennale in 2015-17 and one of the artistic directors of the Bergen Assembly (2017). Mollona has written extensively on political and economic anthropology, especially the anthropology of labour and on visual art. He has made several film projects on labour.
This seminar is a collaboration with Alessandro Petti and The Royal Institute of Art.
Tuesday, 11 September, 18:30 Folke Tersman and Gustaf Arrhenius
Folke Tersman and Gustaf Arrhenius: Borderless democracy
There is increasing recognition that the global problems we confront (climate, migration, terrorism, resistance to antibiotics, etc.) demand stronger and better supranational political organs which will allow us to cooperate across nation state borders and together prioritise what is best for the whole of mankind. At the same time, there is a worry that such organs could move political power even further from citizens and thereby undermine democracy. How can we ensure that democracy survives in a system where nation states have less and less importance? This is one of the questions Gustaf Arrhenius and Folke Tersman address in their conversation.
Tuesday 20 November, 18:30 Katharina Bernd-Rasmussen and Moa Bursell
Katharina Berndt Rasmussen
Imagine Linda, a business woman with strong anti-racist values. Despite her explicit values, she employs only light-skinned people, with Swedish-sounding names. Can we explain the difference between her explicit values and actual behaviour? A similar situation exists on the social level: Sweden is a liberal democracy with strong, anti-discrimination laws that forbid ethnic discrimination. According to very recent investigations, racist attitudes are on the decline amongst Swedes and a clear majority declare positive attitudes towards multiplicity. However, despite this, statistics indicate a widespread ethnic segregation and discrimination. How can this discrepancy be explained on both the individual and social level?
During the last 10-15 years, social science researchers have identified correlations between discriminating behaviour and so-called implicit prejudices. They have shown that these prejudices can contradict an individual’s explicit values and that they exist in all of us. Research results can contribute to explaining observed ethnic discrimination on the individual level — as in Linda’s case — and on the societal level.
But what should we do, as individuals and in society in general, to counteract our implicit prejudices and their effects? One answer to this question requires a moral philosophical perspective, in addition to the social scientific one. I will talk about moral philosophical questions such as: can Linda really be held responsible for implicit prejudices that she is unaware of? Should we blame or censure her? And how far should we go in our attempts to counteract implicit prejudices?
Self-presentation: I am a researcher in practical philosophy at the Institute for Future Studies. My areas of philosophical interest include political philosophy, moral philosophy and feminist philosophy. I have previously carried out research on democracy, discrimination, sexism, racism, harm and justice. In my present research I examine the moral philosophical implications that accompany empirical research on implicit bias. I received my PhD in 2013 at Stockholm University, with the thesis Democracy and the Common Good: A Study of the Weighted Majority Rule. The thesis was awarded the Stockholm University Association’s prize for the best thesis in the Humanities at Stockholm University. I am a university instructor, teaching courses in critical thinking, feminist philosophy, modern political philosophy and normative ethics. I am also editorial assistant for Tidskrift för Politisk Filosofi (the journal of political philosophy), a member of SWIP-Sweden (the Society for Women in Philosophy Sweden) and engaged in the public debate concerning issues such as equality, justice and democracy.
Moa Bursell: Can We Counteract Prejudices That We Don’t Know We Have?
Ethnic discrimination creates an unequal access to resources and opportunities. This relates not least to encounters between citizens and authorities, when ethnic background can affect, for instance, a civil servant’s judgement of how social welfare should be distributed or to encounters between employers and job applicants, when the assessment of the applicant’s qualifications or merits can be influenced.
Discriminatory judgements can depend on implicit — that is, unconscious — values that influence individuals without their knowing it. However, there are studies showing that these implicit negative attitudes can be reduced — or alternatively, controlled — at least temporarily through various psychological exercises. But we still don’t know whether these changes are temporary or permanent. Neither do we know if a reduction of implicit negative attitudes or increased control over them has any significant effect on the real assessments and decisions that employers and civil servants make concerning employment or distribution of welfare. I will present existing research in this area and discuss the form in which efforts to counteract unconscious prejudices might take.
Self-presentation: I am a researcher in sociology at the Institute for Future Studies. In 2012 I defended my PhD thesis, Ethnic Discrimination, Name Change and Labour Market Inequality — Mixed Approaches to Ethnic Exclusion in Sweden. I have continued to research ethnic discrimination in the labour market, and on discrimination in encounters between citizens and public institutions.