2H2K - February 2050: The Slab

“The Falls” at Lake Las Vegas, Henderson, Nevada (2011). [Photo by Michael Light] via Design Observer

[The following is the 2nd short story in a series, the overall project is introduced here; the first story is here; the third is here]

David felt like he had an iron bar passing latterly through his chest. The bar wasn't a romantic metaphor, it was a feeling. Closing his eyes, it took shape; about as big around as his heart, and heavy. David could feel the bar’s weight, as clearly as if it were held in his hand. The most gruesome part of the bar was it’s length. It was longer than his chest was wide. Long enough that the bar extended beyond his body, protruding invisibly through his biceps. Like Frankenstein's neck bolts writ large, he thought. David knew what it was: a chill. In his mind's eye he saw it extending from the sides of his arms as two cylinders. He felt it pulling warmth from his heart, radiating it uselessly into the desert air.

2H2K - February 2050 - And its Discontents: An Introduction

Abandoned Spanish housing estates (Photographs by Simon Norfolk/Institute) via The New Yorker
[Part 2/12 - Return to Part 1/12]

I like to date the beginning of modernity to August 3rd, 1492 - the sparking of the Colombian Exchange that Charles C. Mann writes about in his 1st and 2nd books so persuasively. This was the moment when the relatively densely urbanized Europeans made contact with the long isolated Americas, and set off a global trade in plants, animals, diseases, technologies, and ideas. Many of the founding works of modernity were laid down in the opening years of the Exchange: Michelangelo’s David (1504), Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513), Sir Thomas Moore's Utopia (1516), and Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses (1517). It was the moment that gave rise to the densely urbanized world we live in now. And 2050 is the moment that will give rise to what comes next, what comes after modernity.

2H2K - January 2050: LoaneRs

Carnegie Library (1913)

 

[The following is the first of 12 short stories, introduced here.]

 
Little Jo watched David as he barked commands at a cloud of invisible avataRs - or at least invisible to her. Her phone was dead, the only image she could see in her frames was a light indicating that they were searching for a connection. Little Jo couldn’t see what her fiancé was hearing or see what he was seeing; but she could imagine: the persistently polite, but helpless, scrum of telleRs, cashieRs, and operatoRs. And even though she couldn’t see his face from where she was standing, David’s frustration filled the large front room of the rental shop.

2H2K -January 2050 - Object Orientated Speculative Fiction: An Introduction

My sculpture, Die Die Die (2003), set just about where Frank Gehry's Downtown Guggenheim was slated to go.
  
This past spring I started a collaborative project with my friend Greg Borenstein. Greg came to me with an image: one of my sculptures scaled up until it dwarfed the New York skyline. Because of my interest in urbanism and SciFi, he wondered if I might work with him to imagine an urban future. While I had no idea this project was coming my way, I was immediately ready with two preconditions: No flooded cities and no dystopia. Not because I don't believe in Climate Change, or I because shit isn't horribly fucked up and might get much worse, but mostly, because in the realm of SciFi both mean streets and flooded streets are cliche. And while I am well aware that near-future predictions are some of the hardest to make (and for SciFi authors, some of the hardest to make convincingly), I had a very particular bracket of time I was interested in setting our project within. There are a number of demographic trends, all converging around the year 2050, that could easily make the second half (2H) of the 21st Century (2K) the most remarkable period of modernization we have seen yet.

Political Economy of Zombies: An Introduction

Google search "Dawn of the Dead" 

Today is the 2nd anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and coinciding with the debut on Blu-ray of Brad Pitt’s zombie apocalypse epic, World War Z. This is an entirely arbitrary coincidence, except for the fact that the literary site, The Airship Daily is publishing a piece I wrote equating zombies with anti-capitalist revolution, and the zombie apocalypse with utopia; admittedly strange bedfellows - but not absurd. [Update: Felix Salmon wrote a terrific post in response to the essay for Reuters and David Graeber gave it an amazing endorsement via twitter.] Both neoliberalism and zombies are everywhere and unavoidable, and both mean something, something about us and the times we live in. The essay that The Airship has posted is plenty long, but I thought I’d post here a bit about why I chose to write about zombies: a genre, that growing up, I had actively avoided.

Gay Marriage is The Future

Rev. Robert L Powers (far right) singing with his fellow clergy in Selma Alabama, showing their support for Martin Luther King (1965)

  Three years ago, almost to the day, I posted a text my father, the Rev. Robert L Powers, wrote based on a homily he delivered at a wedding he presided over (and which I attended as his assistant - in full alter boy drag) early that year. As the Supreme Court hears arguments for, and against, gay marriage, I felt it was important to repost my father's thoughts (this time in their entirety). My Father went on to practice psychology, so besides my sister's wedding, this was one of the few occasions I saw him marry anyone. It was the wedding of a young man to a young woman. I am not sure why he decided to speak to them, their frat-boy and sorority-girl friends, and their somewhat bewildered families, about gay marriage - but I am very proud he did. I am aware that most of the religious voices we hear in the debate over gay marriage are those that preach hate and fear in the name of tradition. There was no place for marriages of any any kind in the early church, because as my father explains, “'The future' did not exist in the devout imagination" of those times. But over the millennia the future has seeped into the deepest corners of the "devout imagination" (and sex with it). As my father makes clear, those who oppose gay marriage are on the wrong side of history - the traditions they cling to aren't timeless, and there is no place for them in any future - no matter how devout.

Exposure: A Teachable Moment.

Out in the Cold: Robert Smithson, Proposal for a Monument at Antarctica (1966) Mark Quinn, Self (1999)
  
This past Monday, Nate Thayer posted an email exchange in which he was approached for a 1200 word piece on "basketbal diplomacy", but was also informed by Olga Khazan, the new Global Editor of The Atlantic: "We unfortunately can’t pay you for it, but we do reach 13 million readers a month." I caught wind of this kerfuffle yesterday when my twitter feed blew up. Felix Salmon noted: "There seem to be two kinds of websites: 'We're small, we can't pay you', and 'we're big, plz write for the exposure'." Nate Silver weighed in as well, warning: "If an editor offers no cash but says you'll get lots of exposure, you usually won't get very much exposure." And Matt Yglesias chipped in ironically (sarcastically? facetiously?): "Just discovered that many colleges run professional football teams whose players are unpaid and work for the exposure." This outrage was not contained to the wonk's corner of the blogosphere however, the pretense of "exposure" as pay got under the skin of the art people I follow as well. I was glad to see the outrage was shared by the art writer, Carolina Miranda, but also by the gallerist Magda Sawon. Sawon would seem to have no skin in the game, but does, because artists are the ultimate "freelancers." It was good for me personally to see the outrage reach the artworld, because late last month I had a similar exchange via email, and had been trying to decide if I should to post it.

The Art of 8-Bit History

Luke Skywalker filtered by 8-bit Avatar Maker

"What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual on motorcycles either" Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

A few years ago I began a project to explain Modernism via the original 1977 Star Wars movie. This is not an even match up. To understand everything you need to know about Star Wars takes 2 hours, but to understand even a small corner of Modernism is a project that can eat up ones entire adult life (ask me how I know). What I ended up doing, was viewing the movie under a critical microscope, breaking it down moment by moment and enlarging on every detail. Modernism, meanwhile I was forced to reduce to a few key players, some illustrative anecdotes, and iconic art works and architecture. A friend who came to one of my talks about the project took issue with art historical liberties, he felt, I was taking. But in truth, I wasn't changing the facts of the story; I was changing the resolution of the story. The history I lay out may not have the richness of detail we find in an heavily annotated academic survey, but just as an 8-bit portrait is still a photograph, an 8-bit history is still a history. Likewise, the "truth claims" of Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, Lincoln, and even Django Unchained shouldn't be dismissed because those films simplify complicated histories. While these films can never provide full historical resolution, they remain important looks at important moments.

Last thoughts on Episode VII: Quasi Infinities and the Waning of the Force

Old Story

In 1977 the unprecedented success of Star Wars inspired the scholar Joseph Campbell to claim George Lucas was the best student he ever had. Thirty years later the only serious approach to Star Wars remains Campbell's, but that "archetypal" frame occlude more than it reveals. How many more scifi movies do we need to see about the "One" before filmmakers look back and reconsider what else it was that audiences were so excited to watch? Perhaps millions of us stood in line (some of us repeatedly) to see a a very particular victory. Star Wars didn't "mythologized" an ancient threat, it defamiliarized a threat that was all-too-familiar: the threat that American Cold Warriors posed to American freedoms, but also the threat those rock ribbed "dark fathers" posed to American's sense of themselves as a people. Americans do not want to suck, but in the waning years of the 1970s, it was not unreasonable to believe that that is exactly what was happening.

Thoughts on Episode VII: Delirious Coruscant

Opening, Star Wars (1977); Ken Ohyama, Interchange (2007)

 

What could be more shocking that seeing Luke Skywalker don Vader's helmet? The opportunity of Episode IV, is to revisit the shock that the original opening shot delivered to audiences in 1977. The equivalent of an endlessly huge Star Destroyer passing directly overhead. Although they had never seen anything like it, that was an image audiences were prepared to understand. While the huge scale and crystalline shape of that first Star Destroyer was mind-blowingly new, it was encrusted in white machine parts in the familiar style of a "2001-type spaceship." Lucas had morphed the look of Stanley Kubrick's spindly NASA futurism into an "overwhelming show of force." Immediately following the Episode VII opening text crawl, what at first appears to be the traditional background of star flecked outer space, should be revealed to be the reflection in a filthy puddle. As the shot climbs the audience will understand that we are looking up from the lowest depths Coruscant, the city-planet explored in the Prequels. But unlike the Prequels, the art deco towers we saw in the Episode I, II, and III, are now dwarfed by layered canopy of intersecting mega-structures. And the reflected stars are the flickering tiny lights of the megastucture's darkened under sided.

Thoughts on Episode VII: Learning from the Used Future

Aquitania (1910); Millennium Falcon (1977)

In 1977, George Lucas changed the future in a single movie when he introduced audiences to the "used future." If all Lucas had done was make a 70s SciFi move, almost perfectly lacking in geodesic domes, that would be worth celebrating, but for the first time in the history of cinema Lucas introduced a future with a past. Before Star Wars all spaceships we conceived as totalities. The model was the Modernist Architect Corbusier's great admiration for oceanliners: "“The steamship is the first stage in the realization of a world organized according to the new spirit.” wrote Corbusier. For the Modernists, the ideal to be reached was "visual unity": as if a single hand had designed the entire world at a single sitting. Before Star Wars, all spaceships were Modernist; after Star Wars nothing was Modernist.

Thoughts on Episode VII: Wish Upon A Death Star

Wish upon a Death Star

I am a sculptor. I consider what I do Fine Art, and believe it is a serious undertaking worthy of dedicating one's life to. Although I work to very hard to make what I consider High Art, quality can, and is, found everywhere. It's not just possible for Disney to make a Star Wars sequel that measures up to the original, it is important that they do so. This does not entail choosing an "auteur" with a powerful vision to helm the project, it requires the construction of a creative team.