The Future Isn’t What it Used to Be by M. Beatrice Fazi, Mute:

Tackling the conundrum of the future’s relationship to the present through the prism of digital culture, this year’s Transmediale festival strayed into some chaotic philosophical territory. In her review, M. Beatrice Fazi dismisses conceptions of the future as linear effect of the present, instead embracing models of ‘atemporality’ and untimeliness

From the main stage of Transmediale, Berlin’s annual international festival for art and digital culture, one of the keynote speakers, information technology businessman Conrad Wolfram, tells an anecdote: ‘My four-year old daughter enjoys making paper laptops by folding a sheet, drawing a screen on the top and a keyboard on the bottom. I asked her,’ he continues, ‘”When I was your age I didn’t make paper laptops. Why do you think that was?” After one or two minutes of reflection she said “No paper?”‘ The audience laugh.

Most, if not all of the people in the auditorium were able to find the humour in this little anecdote. They could, in fact, trace back a chronology of materials and inventions according to which technological developments in media and communications have eventually resulted in the specificity of our fast-paced, hyper-tech and very digital times. The joke, however, showed that this will not always be the case. At some point, the contemporary experience of the ‘technologically new’ can and will, if not for age reasons, be thought as a given. The 23rd Transmediale festival chose to investigate exactly this nexus of presents, pasts and futures. Under the captivating slogan of ‘Futurity Now!’, the event sought to expand the question about technological temporality through a varied and rich programme of exhibitions, talks, performances, screenings and workshops. This choice of topic was opportune since for last couple of years what has become one of the main European, new media events opted to focus on the rather worn out analysis of the apocalyptic fringes of technological ubiquity. These debates have sometimes got stuck in paralysing conspiracy paradigms, running the risk of flattening the complexity and urgency of contemporary socio-political and environmental situations into simplistic, well rehearsed templates. In the 2010 edition Transmediale proposed instead a somewhat broader and less explored theoretical agenda, bringing to the fore a critique of the critique itself. Or, in the words of the event’s press release, ‘an era beyond futurist rhetoric, interwoven with the unstable and complex web of economic, political and cultural systems dependent on being perceived as “future worthy” without having been there yet.’ Continue reading >>