DEVIANT FUTURS #3

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 last cycle opens with visions of non-standard futures, paths off the beaten track taken by artists, writers and scientists. A collection of alternative projects, utopias and fictional narratives in which imagined futures take on a hybrid form and, in so doing, become corrupted. They open out onto unresolved fields, speculations taken to the extreme and absurd visions, a whole panel of rather unlikely, but often desirable possibilities, in particular as a basis for developing debate and critical projections.