NONCOMPLIANT FUTURES #2

NONCOMPLIANT FUTURES ventures the hypothesis that a form of ‘propaganda of innovation’ exists and that this propaganda has become, in turn, the focal point for a series of artistic counterstrategies which are critical, experimental and speculative in nature.

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.

This second cycle brings together attempted actions of resistance to ‘innovation propaganda’. It presents strategies by artists and activists that aim to put a spanner in the works of the system, to push it such a point that it becomes absurd or to reveal its inner workings and numerous contradictions. This exhibition aspires to create zones of uncertainty and complexify what is a predominantly positivist debate about the market for innovation and the ideologies that it conveys.