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1. Contemporality
Time is linear; not altogether, however – the arrow of time is partly pointing backwards, and this has been the case for a long time.
Kubrick's ‘2001’ differs from our 2001 in too many respects. In the movie, there was a monolith on the moon, and a gentle human touch made it send a signal ... . In our 2001, there was a monolith cut in two; the corresponding duplicated touch was not gentle but catastrophic; and it didn't send signals. It made a great number of symbols unfold, symbols with no articulation. Perhaps there is a ‘war off/on’ symbol, unveiling itself ... . Symbol-processing is becoming symbol-processing of reality. No good sign.
Not only that our 2001 differs from the movie's; even things from the past pointing to that future are in a lesser degree imaginable today than decades ago. We date back in time, maybe fifty years back. Things imaginable thirty years ago are not imaginable any more. Walking on the moon was reality, thirty years ago. During the 90s it became questionable, not only our possibility, but also theirs, long ago, as there are analyses stating that the short journey of Jurij Gagarin has never taken place.
There is a point of return in G. G. Marquez' novel '100 Years of Solitude'. It is the year 1932; banana plantations' workers on strike. It gets crushed. And so is time: the rest of the novel travels in a backward direction in time. – In a similar manner, for decades there is a phenomenon in culture: the virtual in terms of future has been narrowed down.
During a long time span, the main vehicle rendering the chains between the existing and the possible, between the virtual and the actual was (the idea of) future, and its main agent was art. It established distances and connections, made the existing interpretable, articulable in terms of the possible or the virtual. This order is broken and has been broken for a while.
As it seems, the change in the regime of imagination, from the dimension of future to the now and the near future, and its spatiality – from the endless space to the imploded spatiality of cyberspace – has powerful effects. There is no time or space to articulate symbols, there is only symbol-processing in terms of usage, recycling, and re-invention.
The tactics of art and culture are, at first glance, not similar to any symbolism, any belief exchanging symbols for reality. Still different practices – recycling symbols, appropriating them, reappropriating them, or plainly practices of symbol-processing, created an unconsciously symbolicist culture. Apparently, these practices were not good enough for the articulation of symbols, it means demolishing them or tracking them down. Time to forget the learning from Las Vegas: communication on the level of symbols cannot reach beyond symbols. Time to 'reclaim the future', as Geert Lovink puts it. And this cannot be done within the regime of symbols.
Reluctantly we have to admit that the era of postmodernism with its permanent cultural recycling destroyed huge territories within imagination. We are not our own contemporaries, and art in a large extension is not contemporary with itself.
2. Future imagination: add horizons to events; add events to horizons
There is a medieval representation of the Tower of Babel: a two-floor building with a few windows. And there is a description by Athanasius Kircher: the tower was designed to reach the orbit of the moon. Clearly, there is a difference in terms of the range of the possible. A narrow medieval imagination against the vertical openness flourishing in the Baroque culture, seemingly without limits.
In the worlds of symbol-processing there has been an overestimation of cryptography, of making and breaking codes, exactly because everything was ready-made on the level of signs. Now there is a need for a steganographic (Greek: 'covered writing') turn, it means finding signs that are not displayed as signs; finding signs in their materiality. It presupposes that art and culture leave the level of their symbols.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty stated that the perceptual possibilities, investigated by painters, provide a very long future journey for painting. The statement was never totally refuted, still the arrows of cultural infrastructure pointed elsewhere, towards a regime of symbol-processing instead of perceptibility. It is far from being sure that a turn towards possibilities of perceptualisation reintroduces painting's old status. Many changes have been taken place: today’s a huge repository of hybrid technologies, the emphasis is not on the work but rather on the network. There are new ways to delimit the limits of the imperceptible and the perceptible.
Future art establishes distances between the real and the virtual, in terms of future or in other terms; thus it will extend the realm of the possible, making the realm of the existing more well-articulated. Anything that benefits this process will be called art, even 'non-art' from the now and the past – if that naming will still be interesting at all.
Gábor Bora
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