Term 2 Paper Draft

(Steve: still have a few articles to work in here and solidify arguments. Think it serves as a sufficient rough draft however).

Working title: De-singularities

"Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound..." disembodied.”As human culture on this planet appears to be reaching a critical historical point, there exists a possibility to change the terms of our engagement with the cosmos in which we inhabit. Computer scientists have long theorised that we are approaching a technological singularity, whereby a machine intelligence will introduce a paradigm shift of unparalleled proportions into human existence. This type of thinking is rife with a fatalism that seems to preclude any sort of intervention in this destiny. It is easier to imagine the end of time than it is to solve the crisis of our time. This form of thinking can also be found throughout texts and work regarding the anthropocene. Within it lies forms of thinking that seem to conclude the finality of the destruction of the planet, and the best we can do at this point is to inspire sympathy with those on the front lines of this environmental catastrophe. In this text I will highlight historical and cultural precedence for alternatives to the control systems that dictate the morphological arena of contemporary thought, and through these examples, offer notions on how these concepts can be used in artistic practice as a salvo against the recent political developments in the western world. The construction of time that stems from the early capitalist systems of western europe to this day dictates the manner in which space is still perceived in western nations. As if there is an implied telos to the nation state, in the supposed greatness of an arbitrary geographical boundary born from bloodshed, institutional racism and colonial theft. Within the political right, in typical hubris, exists this dream of a temporal action where the future becomes more like past and less like the present in order to re-invigorate the class and race hierarchies that allowed for white male supremacy.

Throughout non-western cultures there exists a wholly different view of time contradictory to the linearity of western thought. In the Andean altiplano, the Ayamara have a completely reversed notion of time, in that the past is in front of them, and the future behind. Key to many of the cosmologies is the notion that time and space exist in a cyclical manner. Component to this manner of thinking is the central concept of a holistic unity between all things, where an individual's corporeal existence is no greater or less than that of a tree, a river or the entire universe itself. Analogues to this notion can be found in cybernetic theory. The cyborg becomes present where the border between human and non-human is breached. Ambiguity now exists between natural and artificial, mind and body, previously clearly defined areas that differentiated the inanimate from the animate. The boundary between physical and non-physical is tenuous at best. Information as data packets transcending physical geography through sections of the electromagnetic spectrum give cyborgs the essence of fluidity. The cyborg dream is everywhere and invisible, as difficult to comprehend politically as materially. This allows them to be used as oppositional strategies by those marginalised by the militant order of masculine labour. Within both of these tendencies, a relationship can be seen in a non-linear interpretation of time, and therefore space. In considering an image, they are fixed light patterns as messages for the future that exist in non-linear time, containing varied temporalities and result in cultural impact blending time through memory. "It is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space".

A crucial example of dissolving the bondage of western time and space is the Afrofuturist movement. Displaced from ancestral lands and history through the slave trade, black artists, primarily in america, redefined a future history through art and music. "A techno-visionary tradition that looks as much toward sci-fi futurism as toward magical African roots. This loosely gnostic strain of Afro-diasporic science fiction emerges from the improvised confrontation between modern technology and the prophetic imagination, a confrontation rooted in the alienated conditions of black life in the New World..." Arising from the ruins of the neoliberal project in the city of Detroit, techno musicians appropriated the robotic sounds of automated car production with drum machines and synthesizers. The duo Drexciya embodied this spirit. In the liner notes of their album "The Quest", they outlined their future history through a retelling of the slave trade. "During the Middle Passage, many pregnant women, sick or dying or simply too much trouble for their captors, were thrown overboard. The fetuses in their wombs, still accustomed to a liquid environment, survived. They thrived, in fact, growing fins and gills, and made their home in the ruins of an underwater city, where they mounted their counter-offensive against human greed and stupidity."

From the military industrial complex comes another interesting example of the use of considering planetary time scales. When faced with the potential catastrophe component to stockpiling nuclear waste that would last for eons, the US military, in typical hubris, sought to engineer a solution that would speak to the future (while the most obvious solution, not using nuclear fuel and weapons, seemed to be lost on them.) So the Human Interference Task Force was created, involving a variety of experts in semiotics and cultural anthropology to create a solution whereby knowledge could be passed on through generations informing societies that these massively toxic waste dumps had to be avoided, given that perhaps language and symbology would morph into communication forms that would render current visual language useless. One of the groups, revealing the inherent bias of this group, prophesied a future where feminists had taken

A similar line of thought can be seen in minimalist movement of the 70's. Earthworks such as "Spiral Jetty" by Robert Smithson speak to a timeframe that works within the global aeon of the flux of continents and oceanic water levels. Ideas regarding negative feedback loops were developed at this point as key aspects of maintaing a closed system. Interestingly, these notions of abstraction and simplification of complex systems was echoed in the early theories of modelling planetary systems and human behaviour.