Excerpts from my contribution to Ahmad Makia’s artist edition ZIGG: Superficial, November 2018.
[To Ahmad] Your remarks made me think of, once again, the necessity to question existing vocabularies and reinvent their future anteriority, realizing their functioning as hyperstitional entities, bringing about new normals, indeed. However, we often and mostly cannot but stay with existing vocabularies and familiar tropes and try to reinvent them from within. A new terminology is in fact a non-neologism or a heretical transvaluation, only appearing after the fact. So, while questioning the nature of facticity, we need to engage with unprecedented facts that can reiterate and reinforce past neologisms anew, or fulfill their future-oriented inherence. In the words of Kodwo Eshun, in his Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture at Goldsmiths in 2017, this is to retro-currently join the thread of those (non-)neologisms that
“are actually forms of life… The names of and for aesthetico-political positions that operate by disagreements and differentiations, that make claims that must be argued. Each of these is not so much a term as a war of and over interpretation, a stance that aims to intervene in cultural politics, that fashions itself to articulate discontent, to focus despair and depression into theories to live by, theories that are embodied, theories that live in us, and through us, and with us, and on us.”
Recently, at the launch session of Ethnofuturismen at Volksbuhne in Berlin, I addressed such “forms of life” through the notions of “temporal climates” and the “chronosphere.”
Each temporal climate has its prevailing time patterns, which constantly influence and are influenced by other climatic times, their histories as well as the velocity and frequency of the course of their events. To follow the routes of transformation that tie various temporal climates together is to move along their exponential divergence from initial conditions, that is, from supposedly localized situations to planetary scales, while remaining enmeshed within a mutating earth system whose transformation can be neither attributed to a single cause nor a single set of effects. This, of course, requires us to challenge the constructed linearity of historical causation to begin with, as well as the unilateral and progressive movement of time, and question the geometrical politics of such and similar abstract models in relation to the realities of our times and times to come. Moreover, “timelines” and their associated epistemologies need to be stretched sideways, letting the “planes of temporality” and “layers of time” unfold and spread out, in order for us to be able to come into terms with how little we know of our historical horizons, soon enough before they get totally closed on us, and raise our collective sensitivity toward the complex chronometries of life and labor across life forms.
“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. To couple this term with the formulation of “temporal climates” is in fact to arrive at another 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.
What I tried to address in terms of ethnofuturisms are phenomena that exist and exert their force in the manner of a butterfly effect across what, again, 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. All this demands to be collectively addressed, as that which we all have something at stake in. In addition to the aggravation of climatic and environmental conditions worldwide, and to hint back at my there’s also the “AirSpace”, according to a 2016 article on the popular media outlet The Verge, which stands for how the spaces we pass through and occupy internationally are increasingly becoming the standardized product of corporate tech firms –– the “same old same old” of Starbucks, Airbnb, and so forth… “This new geography is the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live or co-work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere we go.” AirSpace is, therefore, an instantiation of the “infrastructure space” of 21st-century life. Accordingly, there could be the notions of AirTime and Infrastructure Time… Is there any moment we can find ourselves off the “airtime” of contemporaneity across our social-mediatized lives? Following the environmental and political crises of recent times, what would be the viable modes of engagement with today’s shared time-crisis? If the distinction between public and private spaces has been de facto “undone” by the machinations of an infrastructure space, then what are the temporal connotations of this undoing? How could we begin addressing our “public time” today?
The hyperstitional artifact of the “chronosphere,” or infrastructure time, or AirTime, is designed to address 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.
So let’s rephrase and repeat in order for a definition to emerge: Ethnofuturisms are those phenomena, traditions, movements, and practices that tend to address the latent coordinates of shared time patterns and temporal paracommons by means of facilitating and intensifying, technically accelerating, butterfly effects across the planetary chronosphere.
Mahan Moalemi 