The third and final part in a short selection of transcriptions of talks from the recent series on ‘The Future’ at the David Roberts Art Foundation. Here’s Stephen Melville’s paper, which constituted a fitting finale to the series. Is the future now?

4. The Future is Now, Now is the Future
Stephen Melville

The two earlier discussions in this series that I was able to attend both seemed to turn quite strongly on a contrast between modern and postmodern representations of the future, more or less as they appear to line up with the contrast between so-called Golden Age and New Wave science fiction. It’s been hard for me, at least, not to hear bits of Beckett stammering in the background, so I was happy to hear Krapp’s Last Tape surface briefly on Saturday. The overall contrast seemed, roughly, one between a future fully distinct from the present and underwritten by a certain faith in science, and a future underwritten by technology and threatened with imminent collapse into the present (or, as one speaker put it, having the shape of an endless intensification of the present) – thus tending also toward a contrast between the utopian and the simulacral, as well as between progress and repetition, and – at least I’ve tried to suggest this – between a certain assumption of shared human being or community and a skepticism about other minds registered, among other places, in a shift in the understanding of the material basis or medium specificity of film from a photographic practice to a form of animation. This last maybe permits an expansion of the postmodern/New Wave text to take account of our apparent current interest in various forms of the undead, and most notably the emergence of the postmodern speed zombie. Neither of these representations seems satisfactory: the Golden Age is, as it were, too much future and in that sense doomed to fail, while the New Wave seems finally not a future at all. Both politics and religion have remained for the most part discreetly in the background, especially religion – which is odd to the extent that one of our continuing interests in the future is, I think, broadly redemptive (certainly notions of apocalypse and the post-apocalyptic, of things more or less shaped like the end of history or the end of the world have put in appearances). It’s perhaps worth opening the contrast a little further off its native ground by taking note of the evident difference between a modern stock market in which one invests for a future that must be awaited, and a postmodern stock market in which futures themselves become a primary commodity and one dreams – sometimes of course in real money – of a present profit made by strip-mining the contingency of the future. Our moment seems to be one that wants to read the phrase ‘the future is now’ – a phrase that I think goes back to the 1950s as a way of naming the new marvels of the present – as ‘now is the future,’ thus as a promise of no more marvels.

Continue reading The Future Papers, Part Three: Stephen Melville

For our Dutch friends: Director of the IMCC, Marq Smith, is contributing to Epistemic Encounters, on the future of the Graduate Art School, at MaHKU (The Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design) this Friday 11 December, as part of an ongoing research project exploring the specificity of artistic knowledge production in the context of exhibition making, art in public space projects, and the significance of research-based practices for the (reformulation of the) curriculum in the current art academy. Why not join him…

Further details here.

Thomson and Craighead will be talking about recent work at Tate Modern on December 12th as part of this event – do come along if you are able:

+ Outside the Material World. Saturday 12 December 2009,
11.00–17.00 Starr Auditorium, Level 2, Tate Modern

To coincide with the exhibition Pop Life: Art in the Material World, this symposium explores artists’ relationships to the market from the 1970s to the present by focusing on mail and ephemeral art outside the market, and in collections and exhibitions today. Given the present financial crisis, strategies of insertion and the circulation of art are reassessed by artists, curators, archivists and academics.

Speakers: Felipe Ehrenberg, Professor Dawn Ades, Thomson and Craighead, Michael Asbury, Adrian Glew, Cristina Freire and, co-curators of Pop Life: Art in a Material World, Alison Gingeras & Catherine Wood.

See: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/symposia/20640.htm for booking information and details of the full programme

Friday 5 February 2010, 10am
Room 2.05c, 4-12 Little Titchfield Street, University of Westminster, London W1W 7UW
Cost: £20/£10 concs.
Download a booking form here

Featuring Joachin Barriendos (Curator, Santa Monica Art Centre, Barcelona, Spain), Jose Luis Brea (Editor of Estudios Visuales, Madrid, Spain), Iain Chambers (University of Naples, Italy), Anna Maria Guasch (University of Barcelona, Spain), Oliver Grau (Danube University Krems, Austria), Joanne Morra (Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, England), Almira Ousmanova (European Humanities University Belarus/Lithuania), Kresimir Purgar (Center for Visual Studies Zagreb, Croatia), Vivian Rehberg (Parsons Paris School of Art + Design, France), Marquard Smith (University of Westminster, England), Oyvind Varges (University of Bergen, Norway), and Nina Lager Vestberg (Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim, Norway). 

This conference is a collaboration between established and emerging scholars, curators, educators, and editors from across a number of European universities and cultural institutions with a commitment to Visual Culture Studies in Europe, and the study of visual culture. The event aims to:

•  Track the ongoing, uneven emergence in Europe of Visual Culture Studies as a field of inquiry across the Arts and Humanities.

•  Explore the ways in which these diverse trajectories in the emergence of the study of visual culture are historically and theoretically distinctive because of the unique characteristics of a specific country, location, language, peoples, their histories of migration, governmental policies, and the contexts within which universities function as sites for interdisciplinary learning.

• Interrogate some of the hazards of this distinctiveness – around, for instance, the hegemony of the Anglo-American, English as the lingua franca of the academic humanities, and questions of publishing and dissemination.

• Discuss how the advent of Visual Culture Studies, with its new ways of seeing, knowing, understanding, and participating might (1) extend our studies beyond the university (2) generate particular kinds of cultural practices, and (3) be itself responding to activities in anything from art and curating to policy making and industry initiatives.

For our Catalan friends: David Cunningham will be representing the IMCC in Barcelona this week at the Catalan Association of Art Critics’ Fifth International Symposium on Art Criticism in a Global World. His opening address to the conference, entitled ‘Global Art/Global Modernities’, will be at 4.30pm on Friday 20 November at the MACBA Auditorium.

Further details here.

The Institute’s resident expert in activist art Stefan Szczelkun’s interview with Yugoslavian-born Nada Prlja is now up on the Metamute site. Read it here.