Collapsible Time

A playbook for art-washing

On the ‘future’ as prefix, digital art aesthetics and FWBxWorldcoin, feat. Žižek’s 2023 book.

“You are the clock.” Wim Wenders, Faraway, So Close (1993)

Imagine the smirk that swept across the faces of art-world critics (not to be confused with art critics, although any art critic worth their salt is a critic of the art world) when Slavoj Žižek rolled out his newest punchline: if he were a dictator, he would ban art biennales to rid the world of its “obsessional neurotic stance” wherein the talk about capitalism, exploitation and racism etc never ends — “not to achieve something but to make sure that nothing will happen.” He is pointing to a phenomenon that is truthfully pervasive, and somehow impossible to curtail. The ephemera of zines, pamphlets and wall statements at exhibitions from the biennials on Žižek’s guillotine to the small, independent art galleries are far from abating, or becoming more concise.

We may nod at and re-post Žižek’s dig at art institution-isms, but we could also be more specific: if only we talked about the threats instead of merely name-dropping them. Mostly, the present and historical threats are abstractified in order to be bypassed, called to the occasion to be extracted from for branding gains. For one, we are looking at anthropocentrism become an easy target as a pseudo-critical problematic employed to divert attention away from extant problems. Visceral, human struggles of the now are too myopic of a concern in the context of planetary reorientations. Who wants to put in the arduous, self-critical work of abolishing racism amongst humans when we could be gathering in roundtables to write new constitutions on multi-species mutualism?

In Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There is No Future (Allen Lane, 2023), Žižek writes to this, surmising that our problem with approaching real, present threats like climate change and colonialism is “not that of the self-fulfilling prophecy, but rather of self-sabotage.” But this observation, however clever, feels naive when we ponder what intention was sabotaged in the first place.

Few domains represent the endeavors of creativity and innovation with the kind of entitlement that is yielded to art. One effect of this symbolic power is that art turns out to be a straightforward solution for other actors who are eager to outfit in such traits as artists, art institutions and curators are pleased to collaborate given the limited financial as well as creative pathways within the confines of the art sector itself. These actors tend to be of the tech and other heavyweight sectors, such as real estate, media and investment, and the philanthropic institutions of their owners. And these outfits often come out to play on the occasion of conferences, symposiums and forums that feature the “future” prefixed to various aspects of humanity: work, intelligence, cities, food, climate, language, identity, even life itself.

When they manifest to the rest of the world, their visual identities comprise more or less the same elements: black backgrounds upon which explosions of particulated abstract forms of flora and fauna emerge, usually through interaction on its website or Kinect installation onsite. This “digital art” aesthetic owes much to the popularity of Refik Anadol’s “techno lava lamps,” and is synonymized with anything future- and innovation-oriented because this sort of art consists of visual, and increasingly, audio output that clings on to easy descriptors, formalist configurations, and wow-factor audience interaction. At this point in art history with critical discourse in surplus, it is hard to believe that when works are made demonstrating little heed to sensory, emotional or intellectual introspection it doesn’t become so as unintended consequence but by design. In other words, they may be “immersive,” but they are disembodied from the present. They pose as taxidermies of neoliberal reverie: skins of vibrant world models for the ever-regenerating era, stuffed with fluff and preservatives but nevertheless and already dead.

For the taking, taken, gone into the Orb

When the cool-cred, semantics and philosophical meanderings that come with art are leveraged to reposition a brand, we – art(-world) critics – call this art-washing. But it also isn’t as simple as distracting an audience (more accurately, potential customers) by painting over ethical missteps with color and jargon. Let’s take a look at social network FWB’s partnership with Worldcoin to produce a station at Feria Material, a popular independent art fair in Mexico City next week:

“Positioning the Orb as an objet d’art disambiguates the paradox of personhood: we’ve arrived at a point in our cultural trajectory where verifying humanity through a cryptographically secure, open source protocol intermediated by chrome Orb hardware is an act of hope within our age of mass technological complexity.”

If you are not yet familiar with Worldcoin’s iris-scanning Orb, it is worth reading MIT Technology Review’s extensive investigation into its corruption-riddled, exploitative practices in the Global South which feed the company’s equally questionable purpose. In this case, the partnership between Worldcoin and FWB – a web3 community known to pioneer emerging technology-enabled forms of cultural production – is rationalized by chunks of words borrowed from the art history encyclopedia. It leaves us to face the fact and practice that institutions, communities and companies assume a set of de-facto ethical and humanist stances upon which the art world is built upon and thereby represents – for the taking.

But look closer: not only does this rationalization linger in art’s perfume of moral superiority, it also anchors on the contemporaneity that diffuses into any room she walks into. A contemporaneity that can be drawn and redrawn. The press statement means to say, we’ve been ushered into an already-determined status quo by the winds of culture, of which we had no agency or say over, so we must circumscribe it with a precise vision of human-technological achievement, TBD. Is the future contingent on the present? These partnerships and forums seem to sputter: absolutely not – look how we are able to liberate the present from the past!

Dizzied by the dyschronometric experience of staring into an Orb, or at an Anadol-esque video art wall, one encounters the collapse of the time-space between the now and the later, as the present isn’t simply being ignored – any dependence or sense of relation between two points in time is also being vacuumed away. The future is at once already here and too far away, a superposition of possibilities that Žižek also mentions in Too Late to Awaken, where he borrows from Jean-Pierre Dupuy the difference between two words in French that mean the future: le futur (the continuation of the present), and l’avenir (that which is to come). By already inhabiting a futur ‘we’ve arrived at,’ as initiatives like FWBxWorldcoin posit, we are building walls that prevent ‘the coming’ of anything new or alternative. 

In response to the MIT Technology Review investigation, Worldcoin’s response was that nearly everything negative that had been uncovered ‘were simply “isolated incident[s]” that ultimately wouldn’t matter anyway, because the next (public) iteration would be better.’ Latching on to futurism around technology denies that it affects people in the present, even if its selling point is its already-being-here. It is the kind of mentality that gives rise to phrases like ‘we’re still in early days,’ which form an excuse to relay potential complications and inefficiencies to some time other than now. 

But technology is not only the thing that is changed by us; its affordances, both actual and expected, also change us. We converge our ways of being, creating and interacting with the incentive flows that embed in technologies and the economies that emerge around them. Just as ‘human-centered’ design thinking seemed to pronounce the obvious — that products have to be designed for humans to use if not live with — so-called future-oriented approaches conspicuously beg the question: what are we designing for if not for a timeframe that extends beyond the immediate present?

The world is so big,

Jing