2015 and 2058

[imomus]

Back in Berlin after my three days in London, I've reported on the Frieze Art Fair opening for The Post-Materialist, contrasting the dandy fizz of Wednesday night's VIP party with the menace of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's new installation in the turbine hall at Tate Modern, TH. 2058. That piece imagines a disaster-stricken London in 2058, menaced by Louise Bourgeois' spider and other spectres.



An article I wrote last week for a special issue of Moscow magazine BG (BG stands for Bolshoi Gorod, which means Big City) has just gone online. I was asked my predictions about life in 2015. Since the article appears in the magazine only in Russian, I'm putting the English version here. It was quite a difficult commission, because 2015 is in a kind of "uncanny valley" relationship to 2008, neither far enough away for us to be able to say anything (because if you look far enough into the future pretty much everything that can be true will be true) nor near enough to us to be exactly like today.

Uncanny Culture
Bolshoi Gorod magazine, Moscow
October 2008

2015 is a difficult date to predict. It's not so far into the future
that we can use it as a Rorschach blot for elaborate futuristic
projections (utopian or dystopian), not so close that we can say --
based on what's happening now -- exactly what it will be like. In
robotics they speak of the "uncanny valley" -- the anxious, slightly
nauseous moment when a robot is improved to the point at which it's
suddenly neither robot nor human, but something unsettlingly poised
between the two. 2015 is an "uncanny" date in this sense; it is
neither going to be unlike what we see today, nor like it. To imagine
it makes us shiver slightly.

To get a sense of this awkward distance in time, I need to think back
to the year as far behind us as 2015 is ahead: 2001. I need to think
about what it felt like for me. In that year I released an album of
"laptop Americana" called Folktronic. One of its subjects was the dot
com bubble burst I'd witnessed at firsthand in New York in 2000; I
imagined Appalachian hillbillies with Casios, employed as web
designers. It was a topical anachronism at the time, but now it would
just be an anachronism; the "freak folk" scene of the noughties (think
of Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Cocorosie and hundreds of others)
has more or less run its course by 2008. And I doubt the Flash media
files of dancing hillbillies I exhibited in a New York gallery back
then would even play on today's computers. If they did, they would
look dated -- full of 1990s-style irony and heavy-handed
postmodernism.

Ah, postmodernism! There's something that's gone out of date in the last seven years, for a start. The binary collapses executed strategically by postmodernism (the collapse of high and low culture, past and present, local and global) are, by 2008, boring us to death. We're thoroughly sick of art which appropriates popular culture, of meta-layering and shallow, reflexive irony, of pastiche and of the mapping of museum to supermarket and supermarket to museum. Philosophers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have proposed forms of neo-foundationalism, austerity, even collectivist authoritarianism as ways beyond postmodernism's banal ouroborosity (the ouroboros -- the snake that eats its own tail -- is the perfect symbol of postmodernism's unbearable reflexivity, and the choking it provokes).

In the art world there have been attempts recently to escape
postmodern banality by reviving eclecticism and Modernism (Documenta
12 was a pivotal show in this respect). But shows like Documenta,
quiet, quirky, academic and neo-Modernist, fail in two respects:
they don't entirely escape postmodernism (which after all loves to
revive, pastiche, devour and vomit out again all former styles). And
they take their place in an annual cycle of biennials which endlessly
"interrogate" or "dialogue with" globalization as theme, and gaze
guiltily at "the Other".

In other words, they are still anchored in a unipolar and imperial
cultural model rooted in the 1990s, a model in which the US and Europe
consume, either guiltily or admiringly, the rest of the world's
culture, and in which globalization happens, by and large, for their
benefit. I call this the Andreas Gursky model, after the photographer
who best captures the 1990s idea of globalization.

But it's now becoming clear that 2015 will not be so much about
globalization in the sense in which Fareed Zakaria describes it in his
book "The Post-American World": "Generations from now," Zakaria wrote,
"when historians write about these times, they might note that by the
turn of the 21st century, the United States had succeeded in its
great, historical mission—globalizing the world." That's a peculiar
construction; why did it take America to "globalize the globe"? Surely
the globe was already global?

I think by 2015 the US will have declined sufficiently (economically,
militarily and culturally) for us to see that there is a difference
between globalization and globe -- between, in other words, a world in
which an array of colourful "Others" are arranged around a central
"sole remaining superpower", and a world in which the Others relate to
each other on equal terms, and don't worry so much about how they're
represented. There will be a clear shift, in other words, from
monopolarity to multipolarity; from what, in the airline business,
they call the hub-and-spoke model to the point-to-point model.

What that means, in cultural terms, is that there will be a net
decline in orientalism (the Magic Realism and World Theatre of the
1980s, for instance, or the constant "dialogue with the Other" seen in
today's art biennials), and a net increase in point-to-point
conversation which cuts out the middle man, the arbitrator, the hub,
which is, in most cases today, the United States and Europe. Instead,
aided by increasingly sophisticated digital translation tools, there
will be, by 2015, a many-to-many culture, a point-to-point culture.

The digital will continue to make old media irrelevant: CD albums,
paper books, newspapers and magazines, public cinemas will all more or
less disappear, except for peripheral retro-fetishistic enclaves (like
the flourishing vinyl fetish). Physical goods will circulate less,
while intellectual goods circulate more and more freely. Copyright as
we know it will die. National television and radio will also melt away
after a series of crises. Media which bring people physically
together, on the other hand, will flourish -- ephemeral performative
arts like live music, theatre and dance have a strong future. People
don't want to spend all their time online, after all.

More spontaneous actions like flash mobbing will develop, and cities
will become backdrops for ludic "urban exploration" and "pervasive
urban gaming". Some of these new "disorienteering sports" (the
"ostranenie" of Russian formalist literary critic Viktor Shklovsky
mapped to the "derive" of Situationists Guy Debord and Michel de
Certeau) will be organized by city mayors as part of local tourism
initiatives. Others will be more dangerous and unpredictable, shading
into terrorism, autonomy, and micro-revolution.

At the same time, people will travel less as oil costs increase and
travel is seen as environmentally unacceptable. So the point-to-point
global dialogue will happen mostly in the digital realm, whereas the
performative boom will be a local one, centred on particular cities.
We will see cities become semi-autonomous, as they were in renaissance
Italy. (Some may, alas, need fortified city walls.)

Steep increases in basic commodity and transport costs will make
people adopt more austere and self-sustaining lifestyles, the kind
once called "post-materialist". There will be general exhaustion with
the old consumer capitalist tension between haves and have-nots,
between boom and bust, between anorexia and bulimia. Instead, modest,
simple lives organized around local barter, community arts, and
self-sustainability will become the ideal, although people may well be
inspired by models on the far side of the world.

Just as we'll see a return to Renaissance-style semi-autonomous
cities, I think we'll see the re-emergence of the "Renaissance Man" --
an all-rounder who can bake bread, edit films, code for the web, write
poetry, eat fire, and cook home-grown vegetables for twenty friends
and neighbours. As the mist clears on the "uncanny valley" of 2015,
what emerges is not a robot, but Leonardo da Vinci.

Comments

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

"The digital will continue to make old media irrelevant: CD albums,
paper books, newspapers and magazines, public cinemas will all more or
less disappear, (....) Physical goods will circulate less,
while intellectual goods circulate more and more freely."

People have been predicting the death of the printed word for decades, yet it stubbornly refuses to die as there is not yet (to my knowledge anyway!) anything as cheap, accessible and simple to replace it. I'd be interested to see what you base your prediction on!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, Q magazine reports this month that Sister Ray / Selectadisk is closing, and that it's the last serious independent record shop in London's West End, and that its closure prefigures the end of record retailing. They quote someone saying it's not cool not to download your music.

Japan recently saw the collapse of its major importer of foreign magazines -- for the last couple of months only a handful of foreign titles has been available in Japanese stores. The situation may get resolved, but it's also possible that the internet meets the demand for foreign information, and that physical objects will become increasingly unprofitable.

Bookshops continue to go bust -- even the W.H. Smith bookstore at Stansted I visited today had notices up saying it was closing down. Book sales and book reviewing have been in decline (http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/goodbye_to_all_that_1.php?page=all) since 1999.

As for films, I notice from my own behaviour that, just in the last year, I've stopped going to the cinema entirely. I download films and project them with my beamer, often for small groups of films, while we eat and drink. It's much more pleasant (and much cheaper) than going to some flea pit and paying $10 (or, if it's London, $20).

[(Anonymous)]

will there be airships?

Lecture

[(Anonymous)]

I know that you said you wouldn't be recording your lecture from the other night, but I was wondering if anyone did record it and was planning on making it available online.

Yoroshiku! from Tokyo

Re: Lecture

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It was video recorded by the AA for their own archive, and I signed a release for internet distribution. But I'm not sure where or when they're going to make it available. I did make sure it would be okay for me to distribute it (perhaps just audio) too. So it's really just a question of me getting a burn and uploading it. Not sure when, though; within the next couple of months?

[(Anonymous)]

The essay inspired me to write a brief rejoinder. A slightly longer version is on my -- very nascent blog -- pabloist.wordpress.com -- Here's the polemical bit, if you're interested:

"I don't know Momus, but it seems that he has extrapolated the future of the world from the way that a very specific class experiences a very specific kind of city.

So, yes, if you have (at least) moderate means of subsistence and more than moderate cultural capital -- your 2015 will look much like Momus' 2015. There will be "ephemeral performative
arts like live music, theatre and dance have a strong future." And there will be " peripheral retro-fetishistic enclaves."

There's nothing new or offensive about this. Most utopias just identify what is good about the present and multiply it.

But Momus is a serious thinker, one of the few serious thinkers in the world of art/architecture/design today. And we should ask more from him than this.

So I want to ask:
what sort of political changes could make this future?

How could (say) a a worker at a gas station in the South Side of Chicago come to live in this world? Where would the food come from? ("first the eating, then the autonomous cultural production")

Who produces the basic infrastructure needed to sustain this future? Nothing fancy: but we will need energy, cloth, food, heat.

How will a world organized around the accumulation of Capital become organized around the exchange and production of culture, meaning and use?

"Capitalist tensions" don't exist in our minds; they structure and produce our world. How can we overcome them?

"

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The thing is, 2015 is only as far away from us as 2001. Enormous structural changes in our systems of production don't seem likely. I was also asked only to look at culture, how culture would be in 2015. "Where will food come from?" was not (thank God!) my problem. But the answer is probably "from the same place it came in 2001, and in 2008".

I suspect I'd write this piece differently now (more reference to economic failure and Bourriaud's Altermodern) even just two weeks later, but basically I'd be doing what we always do when we project into the future: extrapolating from our own experience of the immediate present.

Anyway, thanks for thinking about it and responding -- that's really the whole point of the exercise!

[crowjake.livejournal.com]

or so you wish! (and maybe me too)

I think small cinemas will increase in numbers to be honest, they have much more of a community feel and reflect something more similar to you inviting your friends over to view stuff.

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

"Appalachian hillbillies with Casios?!?"

Hey! I resemble that remark.

(that perfect last line actually gave me a small chill momus... as the essay dissolved slowly, like a lozenge of pleasure in my brain.)

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

"Through most of modern history, (http://the-idiot-king.livejournal.com/), “sublimation” was possible: at the expense of expressing only a small portion of oneself, that small portion could be expressed intensely. But sublimation depends on a reasonable tempo to history. If the collective life of a generation has moved too quickly, the “past” by which particular men and women of that generation may function is not, let us say, thirty years old, but relatively a hundred or two hundred years old. And so the nervous system is overstressed beyond the possibility of such compromises as sublimation, especially since the stable middle-class values so prerequisite to sublimation have been virtually destroyed in our time, at least as nourishing values free of confusion or doubt. In such a crisis of accelerated historical tempo and deteriorated values, neurosis tends to be replaced by psychopathy, and the success of psychoanalysis (which even ten years ago gave promise of becoming a direct major force) diminishes because of its inbuilt and characteristic incapacity to handle patients more complex, more experienced, or more adventurous than the analyst himself. In practice, psychoanalysis has by now become all too often no more than a psychic blood-letting. The patient is not so much changed as aged, and the infantile fantasies which he is encouraged to express are condemned to exhaust themselves against the analyst’s non-responsive reactions. The result for all too many patients is a diminution, a “tranquilizing” of their most interesting qualities and vices. The patient is indeed not so much altered as worn out—less bad, less good, less bright, less willful, less destructive, less creative. He is thus able to conform to that contradictory and unbearable society which first created his neurosis. He can conform to what he loathes because he no longer has the passion to feel loathing so intensely.

...

If you goof (the ugliest word in Hip), if you lapse back into being a frightened stupid child, or if you flip, if you lose your control, reveal the buried weaker more feminine part of your nature, then it is more difficult to swing the next time, your ear is less alive, your bad and energy-wasting habits are further confirmed, you are farther away from being with it. But to be with it is to have grace, is to be closer to the secrets of that inner unconscious life which will nourish you if you can hear it, for you are then nearer to that God which every hipster believes is located in the senses of his body, that trapped, mutilated and nonetheless megalomaniacal God who is It, who is energy, life, sex, force, the Yoga’s prana, the Reichian’s orgone, Lawrence’s “blood,” Hemingway’s “good,” the Shavian life-force; “It”; God; not the God of the churches but the unachievable whisper of mystery within the sex, the paradise of limitless energy and perception just beyond the next wave of the next orgasm."

Norman Mailer
The White Negro

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"In the art world there have been attempts recently to escape
postmodern banality by reviving eclecticism and Modernism"

I'm not entirely sure this is a good thing, because in order to "escape postmodernism" we're going to need to see a revival of the stifling influence of cultural elitism which art (and the wider world even) has only just recently (relatively speaking) cast off.

There was a fantastic series broadcast on BBC4 called Children's TV on Trial (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/features/childrens-tv.shtml) which took a look at how social trends from the 1950s to the 1990s affected the niche of children's television (for those in the UK reading this, you can watch the series on BBC iPlayer)

In a nutshell - 1950/1960s BBC was extremely smug, middle-class, erudite and incredibly pleased with itself. It saw itself as the arbiter of culture to the masses and as such didn't represent Britain's diversity beyond what the BBC thought Britain should aspire to be, or capture the the British children's interest. During the 1970's this slowly had to change because of the introduction of ITV, which was (and still is) a commercial channel and relied on appealing to the masses to garner revenue; it gave the public exactly what it wanted. The BBC gave the British what it thought it needed, and slowly started losing its audiences because of this.

A prominent example; whilst ITV were importing fast-paced, violent Cowboy & Indian shows from the US, the BBC was importing a bizarre Arty drama from communist East Germany called "The Singing, Ringing Tree".




I have to admit, I found 1950/60/70's BBC incredibly interesting and captivating, and longed for it even compared to what the BBC has become today, but that sort of shift backwards will come at a heavy price, one I'm not sure I would be prepared to pay. We'll have to re-welcome cultural elitism to get from postmodernism to "Modernism 2.0" and that's not acceptable to me.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Good framing, I've seen the Children's TV on Trial doc and am, basically, a product of that arty-elitist 1960s BBC myself; I watched The Singing Ringing Tree when it first went out, and blogged about it here (http://imomus.livejournal.com/5189.html) as a source of otherness.

Secondly, I'd say that to think that what we have now -- I'll just sum it up with the word Endemol -- is not elitism is a mistake. It's elitist as hell, but just disguises its top-down message in "ordinary people" acting in certain ways. What it isn't, though, is good elitism, elitism that transmits useful or enlightened values or information. I would back the good elitism of Lord Reith any day over the bad elitism of, you know, Big Brother and Chris Evans.

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

I don't believe in Momus' account of the art world. I no longer make art, but still go gallery hoping at least once a month, and the art world continues to rely on theoretical underpinnings for just about everything. It's a shallow and lazy stance, and a stance that's been in vogue since I was in college, and is something I don't see slowing down in the contemporary (popular) art world.

For example, most art I've seen (even art I love) is not self-contained - what you see is not what you get. You need to read the label to find out what it is made of (like cheery wood harvested from an endangered forest by an endangered tribe or some such) and how the whole work relates to a particular concept or theory du jour (like yet another ill advised 'commentary' on 'relational aesthetics').

Post-modernism has NEVER been populist; it only 'appropriates' and 'comments' on popular culture, but always for a specific and tiny audience. I mean, think of all those critical media studies and their willful embrace of obtuse academia. I love Derrida and Deleuze as much as the next person, but the use of terms like phallogocentrism and deterritorialization should be rare, at best.

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

Eh, I'm not persuaded by your prognostication, but that's not why I'm writing.

I want to know who made that beautiful Micheline Man tire-tumor suit

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Lucy McRae and Bart Hess (http://www.lucyandbart.com)

[(Anonymous)]

Prognostications tend to be like dreams - either wish fulfillments or nightmares. Yours are obviously wish fulfillments, but I'm a bit dubious about this barve new point-to-point world. First, while it's clear that the U.S. is in economic decline (whether temporary or terminal is not so clear), that doesn't necessarily map straighforwardly onto a decline in cultural relevance. Empires remain spectral presences long after their disappearance. Rome remained a relevant "idea" long after its imperial demise and in many important ways the West is a continuation of the Romano-Hellenic model rather than a rejection of it.

Secondly, the art/hipster culture is already globalised. Go to an art gallery opening in New York or Paris or Shanghai or Melbourne and you'll meet the same kind of people, see similar art and read similar curatorial blurbs. Whether the underpinning of all this is American and European is now irrelevant, because America/Europe could melt away in importance and yet the art culture discourse would remain - in other words would remain as a"hub" (perhaps somewhat changed), regardless of the fate of individual countries.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, you seem to be coming close to some kind of statement that cultures have eternal souls! Not sure if I've got that religion myself. Long, lingering, distorted echoes, maybe.

Sociopharmacology of global hipsters

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Hipster cultures bear superficial similarity (cf. Harajuku and Helsinki street fashion photos, or VICE Magazine), though there are differences. I noticed that the Melbourne hipster (or "coolsie" as they call it) culture is a lot more laid-back and easy-going, whereas the London one (and presumably the New York one) has more of a competitive, aggressive edge to it.

I think this difference is at least partly pharmaceutical; cocaine is ridiculously cheap in London and New York, and is all but ubiquitous, whereas, because of Australia's geographical isolation, it's still an expensive luxury drug there, so ordinary hipsters/scenesters just smoke pot or take ecstasy (which, in Australia, isn't MDMA but a mix of uppers and downers).

[mustt.livejournal.com]

Hi, Nick

Thanks again for your contribution! Hope you like the context and all.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Alexey, I just wish I could reader Katarina Degot and those other writers! I will try with Google translation, it's actually not bad at all between Russian and English.

fans asking you to listen to their music

[(Anonymous)]

I just read this exchange on the Ask Lloyd website:
"Lloyd, please could I send you my tape/mp3 to listen to. Your advice would be invaluable. Sorry to ask but..
Yours, singersongwriter"

"A - Sorry,
I just can't.
A) I don't have time to listen to the music that I want to...
B) I'm a rotten judge of what might do well at any give time.
C) What would I say if it was awful?
It would be a no win situation, so please don't ask me.
Thanks, Lloyd"

I was wondering if you get a lot of similar requests from fans and how you feel about them, maybe the same way as Lloyd Cole.

Thank you
Pedro.

Re: fans asking you to listen to their music

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I do get asked to listen to things, and I tend to respond like this (an actual recent comment on a demo):

Hello [Songwriter],

it sounds like Billy Idol after a lobotomy!

I mean that in a good way!

Nick

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

Making predictions like this is a good thing. Seven years is a good amount - longer than the electoral cycle (except in France), but not so long as to be like dreamscape sci-fi prediction. Even if you're wrong, the reasons why you'll be wrong will be interesting. Which forces have you overestimated, which underestimated, which have you failed to see at all? Revisiting your predictions in 2015 will be fascinating.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I will revisit the theme exactly seven years from now via my finger-mounted zo-flog!

[realrealgone.livejournal.com]

You are NostroMomus and I hereby claim my reward.

facelift

[(Anonymous)]

Great post Momus. I see politics has been broached as a subject in the comments - religion? will it exist as we know it in 2015?

I still read daily - have stopped commenting. i'm just making an exception to let you know i renovated my blog. I remember you admiring it at one point.

wewillbecome.com

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Hahaha oh god, that looks so exactly like the Boulder Monster in Galaxy Quest.

[lightelation.livejournal.com]

you used to live with misako?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes. When I moved to Tokyo in 2001 I was living with Shizu and Chie, her schoolfriend. Then Chie married comedian Hakase and moved out, and Misako replaced her. Now Shizu, Chie and Misako are all married and living with their husbands!