The Future of Demonstration is an art series that engages with the transformation towards post-global ecologies and societies by exploring the notion of demonstration and its technological, political, pedagogical and aesthetic capacities. Season 1 VERMÖGEN will take place in Vienna, Austria and online from October 31 – November 11, 2017. Venue: REAKTOR
Algorithmic automation informs almost every realm of life. Our reality increasingly coincides with data-driven models applied to anticipate, simulate and escalate that reality. As the language of power shifts from representational to performative speech, the criteria for critique turn from voicing judgment and dissent to data mining and real-time evaluation. Recalibration facilitates the production of subjectivity in hypervolatile capitalism – a world engulfed in information asymmetries, warfare, ecological disasters and multiple other forms of violence on all levels of life and nature.
The Future of Demonstration proposes to challenge the comprehensive models of competitive simulation by probing current potentials of counter-fiction. The leitmotifs, VERMÖGEN 2017 and PASSION 2018, evoke the powers of imagination to forge, reorient and offer narratives, techniques and affiliations of resistance.
The art series brings together artists, activists, architects, theorists, scientists, filmmakers and other experts. They create intense fabulations in concrete forms and shapes that transgress critique by means of deviant aesthetics, robotic xenofictions, forensic investigation, cryptohacks, extraterrestrial habitats, cellular factories and other performative tools, which open realities instead of regulatively closing the one, calculated reality..
Concerning practice, The Future of Demonstration suspends the separation between art and discourse, i.e. exhibition and conference. Instead, we initiate post-disciplinary practices that condense to demonstrations in the artistic, political, pedagogical and technological sense of the word.
The art series borrows its format from the structure of popular television series with seasons and episodes. Each of the two seasons addresses its leitmotif as if it were through a prism, dividing it into five episodes, once again linking them in various traversing relationships to one another.
Each episode combines art, discourse, performance, sound and film in its own way. The film format focuses on streaming as an art form – after the final episode of the art series the films will stay online as a web series, turning documentation into artistic work.
VERMÖGEN 2017 / PASSION 2018 are not only themes, they also form the defining energy of this collective experiment on technopolitical resolution. As such, the format is an invitation to participants and audience alike to engage in joyful, radical and empowering demonstrations of what we can hope to achieve together.