Portals to The Future
The world is beginning to mirror some of the most dystopian tropes of science fictional imaginings. How might we change course? Mike Pinnington reflects on the artists and thinkers looking beyond a futurology of the tech bro status quo…
A lone, futuristic bodysuited adventurer navigates her way purposefully through a seemingly deserted labyrinthine structure, towards communing – via the technological facility – with nature. From today’s opposing perspectives of simultaneous fear and frequently reluctant, apparently necessary embracing of tech, Chilean artist Patricia Dominguez’s 2024 film, Tres Lunas Más Abajo (Three Moons Below), asks us to reconsider the assumptions we currently hold about the narrative path we as a species seem inextricably bound to; one of either imagined utopia or dystopia through and in the name of ‘progress’.
It is a cosmic work that puts tech and the naturally occurring stuff of the universe – heavenly bodies, plants, animals, mountain ranges, us – in conversation; more than that, in alignment. A result of her residency between Switzerland’s CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider, and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, Tres Lunas Más Abajo demonstrates the theoretical and futurecasting value of the former. One of the world’s most ambitious and innovative centres for scientific research, CERN’s stated goal is to ‘advance the boundaries of human knowledge’. In addition, it fosters and enjoys a close relationship with artists, through residencies and commissions in the name of collaboratively and creatively pursuing what it calls ‘the big questions about our universe’.
The wording, like the vibe CERN projects to the world, is optimistic and ambitious. It puts one in mind of (and surely in-part inspired) Simon Stålenhag’s 1980s rural Sweden-set Tales From the Loop (TFtL), in which the author reimagines the country’s government as having established the world’s largest particle accelerator in 1954. This also happens to be the year its real-life analogue, CERN, was founded. Stålenhag’s alternate reality, not so very far removed from our own, is populated by fantastical technological wonders; and yet its tone is almost resolutely downbeat.
Poetic and affecting, it presents an often haunting vision of the future, one where disused tech litters suburban hinterlands. Mystery, anxiety and gloom seem to cling to those intimate with the workings of the Loop; others, meanwhile, are relegated to passive roles, subject to a failing experiment, one to which the thought-leaders and authorities remain blindly, hopelessly wedded. The message of Stålenhag’s retro-futuristic artwork is frequently cautionary: beware progress at the expense of our humanity. We see such warnings – sometimes nuanced, often not – time and again in science fiction.
Consider the ease with which the order is given to dump extinct-on-Earth flora into the abyss of space in Douglass Trumbull’s heartbreaking film Silent Running (1972); or, more or less contemporaneous to TFtL, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s beautifully bleak humanity-on-the-brink film, Last and First Men (adapted from Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 novel). His essayistic vision thrums with poignancy; the only trace of future human kind represented by Spomeniks, real-life utopian monoliths of socialist era Yugoslavia. In its use of these monuments to a fallen system found in a country that no longer exists, Last and First Men is a Lost Futures hauntological text writ large.
By contrast, CERN might be seen, perhaps especially in our present moment – where ideas of a slow cancellation of the future hover malignantly – as a kind of Cnut-like institution, standing defiant amid a tsunami of dystopian thinking. In this age of anxiety and lingering (worsening?) post-millennial tension, CERN retains and represents a sense of – even reverberates with – what we used to think of as ‘THE FUTURE’, one containing not the terminal erosion of hope, but an abiding belief in and commitment to it.
But it isn’t alone in holding space for thinking and possibilities beyond a mere defeated acceptance of ‘the way things are’. In his 2010 book What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly similarly makes the case for optimism, speaking in terms of Protopian (rather than utopian or dystopian) thinking, a condition of incremental progress with technology at its core.
Futurist Monika Bielskyte’s Protopia Futures text, quoting designer and researcher Radha Mistry, notes: “Mainstream futurist discourse tends to extrapolate from the status quo” by proposing “singular, predetermined future visions… bound by the constraints and suppositions of dominant perceptions of reality.” We must look elsewhere and propose other possibilities, then, so that, says Bielskyte, “there is no singular ‘future’ trajectory but rather a vast scope of many alternative futures.”
One such possibility lies in what philosopher Yuk Hui calls Cosmotechnics, defined as: “the unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities, whether craft-making or art-making.” The theory heavily informs and lends its title to a current group exhibition at FACT Liverpool. Cosmotechnics the show features artists who, through sculpture, video, data and sound explore ‘how local ways of thinking and sensing can offer multiple perspectives… [where] artwork becomes a portal to rethink our relationship with technology.’
CERN might itself be thought of as one such portal. There, confounding current dire predictions, those unafraid of imagining new ground outside of and beyond the tech bro status quo, could plot a course to a different destination altogether – one that centres the natural world, technology, compassion and interconnectedness.
Mike Pinnington
Cosmotechnics continues at FACT Liverpool until 26 January
Images, from top: Patricia Dominguez, Tres Lunas Más Abajo (Three Moons Below) film still (2024); Tales From the Loop artwork, © Simon Stålenhag; The Globe of Science and Innovation, © 2005 CERN, Maximilien Brice
