She is the patron saint of the blind, and there are two versions of why eyes are her emblem. Lucy, holding delicately a plate of two eyeballs. I have been magnetically drawn to any painting or figure of St. Two protagonists narrate how the control and exploitation of environmental life cycles and organisms become a blueprint to achieve such futuristic visions. ![]() Set in a space colony on Earth, this new sci-film explores how the future of smart cities relies on the promise of “sustainable” closed systems in the face of health and ecological crises. It is crucial to rethink what a practice of self-care mean in a collective manner, since the industrialization and unequal distribution of calamity has rendered self-care obsolete.Įxample: The Sky Oscillates Between Eternity and Its Immediate Consequences, Nadim Choufi, 2021 Each individual is responsible for their mental and physical wellbeing in an impossible race against all the conditions which are deteriorating our bodies at an accelerated pace, from environmental changes, to strained work schedules, to all the other products we are encouraged to use and consume. ![]() There’s an entire market around this idea, and it keeps changing at a faster pace, every trend that comes out does away with the trend before it and what we conceive of as “self-care” changes, while for past civilisations “self-care” was an art most probably practiced by a few people who were privy to that knowledge of themselves, today “self-care” is the main consumer ideology. The image of a healthy anthropocentric human “future body” has been pushed for and propagated for ages and has shaped our relationship to our body by dictating what regimens we need to consume, forms of exercise, types of chemicals and radiations to avoid. Nabil Anani, In Pursuit of Utopia #2 (2020), mixed media on canvas, 100 x 110 cm Despite the “naturalness” of the paintings, they embody a future vision, they are not realism but a break in the cycle. The other day I went to see a show by Palestinian painter Nabil Anani titled “In Pursuit of Utopia.'' The paintings show landscapes which appear to be returning our present gaze, they are these reflections from the future which strike us with possibility. The body in the present would inhabit this future vision of a land with no walls or barricades, by continuous acts of thought and resistance, leading to liberation from constraints and violence: this is a future body to which one aspires.Įxample: The vision shouldn’t fit into our idea of a commodified futuristic aesthetic. The importance here lies in this continuous thinking of this future, the vision is not a science fiction, nor a projection, it is an ongoing activity that takes place in the present, it needs to be sustained, and it needs to be powerful. This passage of cosmic metaphysical myth suggests that a future vision can hold immense powers which would overwhelm forces of darkness, create a rupture in a cycle and bring forth future bodies. ![]() Henry Corbin, Cyclical time and Ismaili gnosis, 1983 Taking up Ahriman's challenge, Ohrmazd inflicts upon him a vision of the future, which Ahriman rejects but which nevertheless overwhelms him: in this vision he beholds the destruction of his demons, the coming of the Resurrection and of the "Future Body" (tan i pasen)." “And in still another grandiose episode the myth suggests that the "cycle of time," the "aeon," is for Ohrmazd the instrument of his victory over the Antagonist. These are some of the objects, images, and moments that we find in Wang Shui’s work.” Drones flying through gaping holes in Hong Kong high-rises. Silkworms mating on a horizontal television screen. Contemporary art is such a laboratory where the posthuman body of the future is folded back on to the present, exceeding the traditional constraints of sci-fi genres and typical fantasies of the future, the experimentation which contemporary arts provide allow for an approach to materiality and space that has an actual concrete effect.Įxample: The work of artist Wang Shui “Dripping, crackling shards of laboratory-made materials emitting, like alien shrapnel, low-frequency groans. As the future folds back on to the now, it revolutionizes how bodies are thought, treated, codified and transformed. ![]() To think “futurity” we need to consider the bodies produced by “futurity” not just as a distant possibility, but “futurity” as a theoretical laboratory which effects how we think of bodies now. Posthumanism in its different variations and trajectories has shown that the body is central to our thinking of futurity, whether the body is completely discarded in future visions where the mind rules and the body dissipates, or professing the different mutations and connections which tie the body’s morphism with social, political and technological networks.
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