News From The Future

In 1852, Karl Marx claimed that "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce" (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). Throughout history, from natural disasters to political events, from economic failures to neighborhood fights, we find events in a repetitive form, either coincidentally or naturally. From this pretext, my intention is to prepare people for the worst.

Walid Raad and the Atlas Group use images to play with the real vs. fake boundaries of history. He creates an archive of past events. I propose an archive of the future so that the unknown may be known. We might as well be ready for the catastrophic and accept it; if it doesn't happen, then great, but if it does happen, then society will be in a mindset, in which this has been seen and thought-through with a cool-mind and policies will not be taken in the moment, with irrational thought.

The software for this project takes past events, from different categories, including but not limited to, natural disasters, wars, local crimes, economic meltdowns, and remixes these with actual cities and dates from the future, at random. Some results might be ridiculous, but others might hold some truth. It is the collective that will bare the consideration and make the viewer think of the various situations.

In the installation above, the collages were mounted onto a projection system, where they would be seen endlessly looping.

Here are a few resulting screenshots of the random collages: