Lecture delivered on the occasion of the publication of Ethnofuturisms (Merve Verlag, 2018) at Volksbühne in Berlin, September 2018.
“How do ethnic conditions and regional micro-histories influence the future as such?” This question might seem much easier to answer if reversed, for there have been many episodes of preordained futurity imposed upon local lifetimes that were and are still being lived under the circumstances of one colonialist script after another.
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“Advection” is the term used in meteorology to explain the transfer of heat or matter by the flow of a fluid, especially horizontally in the atmosphere or the sea. If considered in the context of so-called “temporal climates,” advection can evoke a familiar trope, the butterfly effect, which emerged from within hard sciences and has since appeared in fields as far as extreme fiction, as well as late capitalist spoken language, given how chaotic we routinely feel the world has gone… A groundbreaking discovery, it actually was a bit of a disappointment to all weathermen, and their avid audience, who thought received announcements were or even could be quite accurate.
Ethnofuturisms exist and exert their force in the manner of a butterfly effect across what could only suggestively be called the “chronosphere”. This is to suggest the very complex materiality as well as the planetary expanse of temporal resources, similar to what is at stake in the currently critical condition of other terrestrial resources as well as fluid and atmospheric elements.
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The hyperstitional artifact of the “chronosphere,” or infrastructure time, or AirTime, is the realm through which temporal advection is regulated, that is, the horizontal transfer of the “heat or matter” of time, in all its fluidity, across our planetary history.
Mahan Moalemi 