FUTURS NON-CONFORMES #1

Following on from the apology of progress that has existed since the Renaissance, today’s vocabulary of innovation is a rhetorical tool par excellence. It inundates dominant discourse, spreading from the field of politics into the sectors of work, education and art. This phenomenon has played a key role in establishing the techno-sciences as the default belief system, making the consumption/innovation duality the global economy’s principal driving force and acting to perpetuate the myth of infinite economic growth.

However at the heart of the prevailing techno-positivist context, numerous critical, alternative, deviant and speculative artistic practices are emerging. Their aim is to invent alternate routes, to take a whole new look at the situation in a critical, grass roots reappropriation of the possibilities offered by the technological society.

Taking this premise as its starting point, NONCOMPLIANT FUTURES brings together a selection of artists, theorists and activists who question and challenge the discourse of innovation and utopian technological solutionism. This online exhibition is organised into three six-month cycles and it will question, in a variety of ways, how we imagine and have imagined the future (dated, near and distant). It attempts to highlight cross-disciplinary trajectories and multiple strategies in order to expose the cult of innovation and to disrupt or even corrupt it. This is an invitation to reinstate such notions as imperfection, deceleration, inefficiency and the opacity at the core of our visions of the future.

The first cycle represents a retrospective analysis of the machine of progress and innovation as seen through the eyes of artists who collect, archive and criticise the myths and contradictions of a technological utopia that has developed over the decades, which started with the industrial revolution and has continued up to our current, post-media era.