Documenting the Future

It seems like the world is falling apart. Still, people go about their lives: they cook meals, go to work, make homes, shop, scrolling and tapping along the way. What Do People Do All Day? asks us to think about our passive day-to-day habits while challenging us to imagine what we might do instead, and what needs to be done.

If history at its best is a blueprint for science-fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable an access to the future. For many of us, computer technology seems almost inseparable from Silicon Valley or the Department of Defense funding that spurred so much high-tech development. But in the Soviet Union of the 1960s, some technologists saw computers as machines of communism. How might we use computation to get us out of our current state of digital feudalism?

Loneliness is a deadly epidemic. Oceano de Amor by Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann portrays ten volunteer members of the Army of Love answering questions about love and labour. Here, in Cuba, one of the few remaining socialist countries, the members describe an automated future in which distributing love will be the only form of work.

The nation-state is a relatively recent innovation, one that tethers belonging to borders and leaves the non-citizen out in the cold. Markets and property have propped up these fixed alliances, but as even they become increasingly immaterial, perhaps citizenship too can become more diffuse.

To ‘mine’ is to extract elements of the earth’s physical materials. But data — often personal — is also mined. With ‘Canary in the Coalmine’ Simon Denny explores not just the political and environmental significance of mining, but also the role of work and value throughout human history, and in the rapidly changing present.

Seeing is believing, or so it goes. Critic Nora Khan and filmmaker Theo Anthony will discuss their work on vision, surveillance, technology, and justice — seeing how photographic, machine vision, and visualization technologies have affected everywhere from tennis courts to criminal courts.