subversive potentials in remembering and knowing/ the future archive

subversive potentials in remembering and knowing: the future archive project

We will give a presentation and host an open discussion on saturday, May 26th. Throughout the duration of the summit, we will run a series of spontaneaous, interstitial and open conversations and interviews with summit participants, using the discursive architecture of the future archive project (see below).

The future archive is a project that issues a series of responses to the problem of how to perform futures. It engages interview- conversations that are set in possible times and spaces to come, which two or more people performatively inhabit as proposed versions of futurity. From there, contemporary society is remembered. Upon every conversation, a different future is at stake.

Aiming to offer spaces for carefully developing vocabularies and gestures which might point towards potential ways of thinking, acting and existing, the project encourages articulations of hopes and desires for future ways of co/existing, negotiating the space between a remembered present and a potential future, as well as facing up to the problematics of the proposals and imaginaries at hand. With the questions of transformation and the social as its starting point, the future archive generates a map of divergent scenarios and tactics, focusing on connections as well as points of disagreement between interlocutors.

At futurearchive.org, all material (audio/video/text etc) generated in the framework of the project becomes available for download, commentary and non-commercial use.

In 2007, the future archive brings forth a series of collaboratively curated activities, pertaining to thematic strands within the project, that take the form of discussions, performances, screenings, and so forth. In a relevant institution or open space, collective transformation of a present space into a site of futurity is attempted.

Future is not a noun, it's a verb.
-Bruce Sterling

We would like to take this statement as a basis for thinking about knowledge as verb.

The future archive stages divergent rehearsals and formulations of strategic means, through which the transference and transformation of ideas, knowledges and modes of relation may be practised. Such rehearsals are essential to any micro-transfiguration of present socio-political situations (of Empire). The methodology articulated through the future archive is, in part, an attempt to explore and experiment with the ways in which we consider, construct and enact our relationships to, and within, the world. This kind of questioning is important to us in our imagined transformations of society because we, individually and collectively, make our worlds through our consensus and participation, through our insurrection and negotiation.

The process actualised by the future archive is to do with knowledge in the sense of "knowing ones knowledge” at a given point, knowing its situatedness and what one can do with it. Perceiving knowledge as a quite flexible and virtual playing field within which to manoeuvre and come to act, as opposed to conflating knowledge with pre-accumulated information or determinist factuality. The conversational format utilised by the project aims to establish spaces for sharing ideas and strategies in order for them to bring about new modes of questioning, imagining and knowing. The delineation of a discursive and epistemological field is the crucially difficult process at the basis of these conversations, which reveal knowledges as open and translatable bases for action and movement.

Manuela Zechner/ Anja Kanngieser

Manuela Zechner is currently based in London, where she coordinates the future archive project and works with Critical Practice Research Cluster at Chelsea College of Art www.criticalpracticechelsea.org. she collaborates on various projects in the field of media/performing arts, and frequently facilitates discussions and workshops around themes of art, politics, organization and education.

Anja Kanngieser is a researcher based in melbourne, australia. she has been examining the intersections between aesthetics and activism, specifically german activist groups that use aesthetic techniques as a means of articulating their dissent. she is also involved in the future archive project, and works with performance,
installation and radio.
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For more information on the future archive project and related events: futurearchive.org

Starting from the summit, the project will take on different formats at various sites;

May 24-28th 2007, education summit: presentation and interviews-conversations; video edits will be made available as v2v (on futurearchive.org and summit website)

June 3-7th 2007, G8 Heiligendamm:
further interviews, local/web broadcast via kein.tv and futurearchive.org

June 18-31st 2007, London:
evaluation and editing of overall project, and

end June 2007, Chelsea College of Art, London;
project presentation and discussion hosted by Critical Practice Research Cluster

for other events see website. If you would like to arrange for a time to join us for a future conversation, send an email to manuela*at*thisappearance.org