published on
Continuing our theme of ‘futures’, we are delighted to share a conversation between artist and writer Diann Bauer with writer and theoretician Suhail Malik about time. The focus of Diann’s research is time outside of human experience and how it impacts how we live in relation to the anthropocene. With this in mind the conversation begins with an quote from a 2016 article by Malik and Armen Avanessian about the idea of ‘The Speculative Time Complex’ where Suhail says:
'The main reason for the speculative reorganisation of time is the complexity and scale of social organisation today. Systems, infrastructures and networks are now the leading conditions of complex societies rather than individual human agents. Correspondingly, human experience loses its primacy, as do the semantics and politics based on it. The present as the primary category of human experience, which has been the basis for both the understanding of time and of what time is, also loses its priority in favor of what we could call a speculative time-complex. Complex societies — which means more-than-human societies at scales of sociotechnical organization that surpass phenomenological determination — are those in which the past, the present and the future enter into an economy where maybe none of these modes is primary, or where the future replaces the present as the lead structuring aspect of time.'
Using this as a starting point, they speak about finance, insurance, risk, scale, climate collapse and our relationship to an unknown future that is none-the-less the conditioning force of our present.
Read ‘The Speculative Time Complex’: http://dismagazine.com/blog/81218/the-speculative-time-complex-armen-avanessian-suhail-malik/
Watch 'Rumsfeld Epistimology of Climate Change': https://vimeo.com/579819571
Diann Bauer is an artist & writer based in London. She is currently a researcher at Westminster University working on questions regarding the discrepancy between time at extra-human scale & the linear persistence of temporality focusing on what this discrepancy means for how we understand ourselves as a species in relation to the anthropocene. Much of her practice is collaborative & interdisciplinary with projects including Laboria Cuboniks, with whom she collaboratively wrote and published Xenofeminism, A Politics for Alienation in 2015. (laboriacuboniks.net) & A.S.T. (the Alliance of the Southern Triangle), a working group of artists, architects & curators who's focus is urbanism & climate change. Bauer has screened and exhibited independently at Tate Britain, The ICA, The Showroom & FACT Liverpool, Deste Foundation, Athens, The New Museum, & Socrates sculpture park, New York. She has done projects with Arts at CERN & recently worked as part of a team on the German Pavilion for the 2021 Architecture Biennale in Venice. She has taught & lectured widely at universities & cultural institutions including: Cornell University, Yale University, the New School and Cooper Union (US), HKW (Germany), ETH (Switzerland), DAI (Netherlands), Ashkal Alwan (Lebanon), The Tate & the ICA London.
Suhail Malik is Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, London, where he holds a Readership in Critical Studies. Recent & forthcoming publications include, as author, ContraContemporary: Modernity's Unknown Future (Urbanomic) & 'The Ontology of Finance' in Collapse 8: Casino Real (2014). Malik is co-editor of The Flood of Rights (2017), a Special Issue of the journal Finance and Society on 'Art and Finance' (2016), Genealogies of Speculation (2016), The Time-Complex. Postcontemporary (2016), & Realism Materialism Art (2015).
Royalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.com
The technecast is run by Julien Clin (@ClinJulien) & Polly Hember (@pollyhember). Please email technecaster@gmail.com if you would like to be featured on the podcast. Follow us on twitter @technecast to keep an eye out for the latest themed call for papers.
- Genre
- Research