Individual contributions to the future.
Anthony Y.H. Fung, PhD
On the Imagination of the Future
The study of online fiction texts, visuals, and their fandom(s) is an avenue towards the understanding and tracking of future imaginations typical for youth, GenZ or the net generation. All these online formations can be studied under a framework of cultural studies in which we acknowledge the agency and even the resistance of an active audience (Fiske, 1992), or the dual role of a writer/reader as a textual poacher (Jenkins, 2013). In practice, the study of these online texts examines the representation, articulation, and interpretation of the online fiction and related cultural forms that can reveal how youth tackles the future challenge. In the tradition of study of online/digital fiction, the study is conceived in the context of the work and labor behind authorship/readership (Zhao, 2017) and the contractual terms formed between readers and writers (Tian & Adorjan, 2016) as well as between the platforms and producers possibly situated outside the limitation of capitalist domains. In short, with the production/consumption of digital works, anyone can become an amateur writer, author, or producer. In other words, the study of such productions and fandom(s) “as a part of the fabric of everyday lives” (Gray et al., 2007) is closely related to the creative writing/reading not only bounded in digital space, but also in imaginations that answer the untapped and unanswered questions of the future of humanity.
Joff P. N. Bradley, PhD
On the O(r)bscene of the Capitaloscene
To all you kids down there, I was once a child with a dream looking up to the stars. Now I’m an adult in a spaceship with lots of other wonderful adults looking down to our beautiful, beautiful earth to the next generation of dreamers. If we can do this just imagine what you can do. (Sir Richard Branson)
When I witnessed the recent space travel of Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, I felt deeply sicked. Listening to Branson I convulsed in his obscene ecstasy. I felt violently sick because the world in the last few years has turned obscene. The obscenity of his rocket mission burns and consumes the orb of the world. Verily, there has been an irruption of the obscene. The conspicuous display of wealth and power by people like Trump, Branson, Bezos and Elon Musk is obscene; it reveals the “total visibility of things”, total “transparency,” according to Baudrillard. We can say a pornography of wealth. The idea that super-rich people can leave the Earth at a time of global emergency is manifestly obscene. The orb is o(r)bscene. As the prefix ob refers to the idea of hindering, we find a hindering of vision and perspective. In this sense, the ob-scene expresses the collapse of distance in our understanding of our own milieu. Yet, what I witnessed became a painful “splinter in the eye” as Adorno says in Minima Moralia (“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available”). The obscenity I witnessed is the splinter in the orb of my eye.
I shall therefore focus on the o(r)bscene of the capitaloscene and make sense of it through science-fiction and utopia, which are prisms to forecast the becoming of the planet. I find this exemplified in Huxley’s Brave New World and its class system and the extraterrestrial pleasures of its higher echelons. I find this exemplified in the science fiction of Westworld where the o(r)bscene is expressed through both the pleasures of the consumers and the robots. My intention is to mine the history of utopian and science-fiction to find alternative models to question the obscenity of the capitaloscene. Following Baudrillard, its intention is to proffer critical, excrescent models, which act as ‘splinters in the eye’. Such critical models will trouble our collective disavow of the world as it is. Such critical models will trouble our collective image of the unworld (immonde) as it is. I therefore focus on vision and sight and the question of the o(r)bscene, which is to say, the orb as obscene is the real that is de-distanced from us. This is the logic of Baudrillard in Seductions. I am going to use a collection of theoretical models such as Virilio’s understanding of the collapse of distance and Heidegger’s understanding of broken spectacles (distinction of ready-to-hand and present-to-hand) to appreciate how it is obscene for Richard Branson to call the Earth ‘beautiful’.
Heidegger said upon seeing the photograph from the moon of our Earth, that this was no longer the Earth on which we live. The recent space journeys by the richest people in the world who have left for the orbit of the orb means that this is the world on which they do not live. Capital is now extraterrestrial and our wandering Earth is left more and more in errance. What I saw in these super-rich men leaving the Earth was an abnormal outgrowth, a cancer and conspicuous display of wealth and greed. In bearing witness to this event, and reacting to my violent seizure and disgust, I think I can extract a critical model which we can use as a pedagogical tool to critique the greed and obscenity of the super-rich. I am writing an obituary of the obscene.
In response to the obscenity of capital, I propose a pedagogy of seduction, to return to the orb and its seduction, a return to the globe of our eye: a delight in our Earth, globe, sphere, planet, world and orb. We need a new theatrum orbis terrarum (“Theatre of the Orb of the World”), a new modern atlas of our planetary home.
Raluca Nicolae, PhD
Timescapes within Alternate Realities
VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) is an acronym coined in Harvard Business Review to describe the current world. We definitely live in an uncertain reality, under the threat of the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, economic unpredictability, political animosity. The future is also highly volatile and its essence hard to grasp. Consequently, we project our hopes and fears in dreamlike/nightmarish alternate universes which sometimes are transformed into utopias/dystopias. For instance, Hisoyaka na kesshô (Secret Crystallization), a dystopia written in 1994 by Ogawa Yôko, became an international bestseller only after the publication of the English translation (2019) under the title Memory Police, maybe because it has conjured a sense of seclusion similar to what we experienced during the lockdown. Objects disappear from a nameless island and soon the inhabitants forget all about them. The boundaries are wiped out, the reality is dismantled piece by piece and time, the universal landmark we all refer to, crumbles down as people on the island are stuck in a perpetual winter. The immutability of time in Memory Police is paralleled by another distorted chronological dimension: the reverse of the natural flow of time, as depicted in The Emissary by Tawada Yôko. The kids are growing old, their health is rapidly declining while their grandparents are struggling to take care of their debilitated bodies, touched by premature old age. Within the time framework, another interesting aspect that is worth mentioning is the time travel motif, tackled in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1967) by Tsutsui Yasutaka, transformed into an animated movie by reputed animation director Hosoda Mamoru (2006). In addition, we can find a wide range of examples in popular culture, particularly in animation and live-action movies such as Erased (2016) – where the main character travels back in time to prevent certain incidents from happening – or the animation release Your Name (2016) –, in which the protagonists are separated by two different timelines that could briefly converge when they exchange phone messages. The timescapes put forward by utopian/dystopian literature continue to fascinate us since the chronological order is moulded into unconventional shapes: time is frozen, turned upside down or rewind backward or forward as a response to our imagination.
Pascal Rudolph, PhD
Musical Identities, Pop-(Post-)Humans and the Transmedia Music Cultures of the Future
We are constantly surrounded by media worlds – and identities are created and negotiated there all the time. Such constructions take place primarily on digital, globally available platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, TikTok or in video games. Here, the pop star is a crystallization point for cultural, economic, and social phenomena. Pop music and pop stars not only reflect cultural and social norms, but also shape them. When we talk about pop musicians, we are talking about (post-)humans whose representations of identity people often relate to and align with themselves. Pop stars can be seen as ubiquitous "projection surfaces." As transmedial phenomena, they create influential identities that open up new challenging worlds of social interaction and identities, while also contributing to the maintenance of systems of oppression.
My subproject consists of two parts. First, I aim to understand contemporary transmedia music culture by analyzing the (co-)construction of musical identities across different media texts. For this purpose I utilize Philip Auslander's concept of Musical Persona (2021) and combine it with a transmedial approach. In this way, I analyze how facets of identity such as race, sexuality, and gender are negotiated in the arena of pop culture. In my second part, I shift from a reception-situated perspective to a production-situated perspective. Through qualitative and semi-structured interviews, I want to ask pop artists and producers about their visions for the future. What might a musical identity look like in 3, 5, 10 or 100 years? How will transmedia music culture change? And how would these changes affect our lives? What are the worst-case scenarios and what are the best-case scenarios? In my subproject, I therefore take up the topic of musical identity of the present in order to connect it with questions of the future.
Maria Grajdian, PhD
Roboethics & AI, Digital Humanity, Elusive Aliens
Anthropologically speaking, humans as superior mammals have evolved throughout the millennia by adapting both to the circumstances of the environment and to the requirements of their biology for the survival of the species. Several centuries of modernity and three decades of late modernity have, however, gradually revealed the complexity of individual identity dynamics in humans, increasingly disclosing opposite dimensions within the existential spectrum: indelible selfishness combined with an innate need for belonging, brutal ferocity counterpointed by limitless tenderness, ruthless competitiveness challenged by a deep longing for love and acceptance. Moreover, what might be described as the annihilation of individual identity in recent times is intrinsically related to the dissolution of national boundaries despite desperate efforts to keep and reinforce them in the past 24 to 28 months in the wake of the global pandemic and an military invasion reminiscent of colonial times, and moves in tandem with freshly re-invented nation branding and military supremacy, compounded by the politicized economy of cultural consumption, the power of quotidian “subculture(s)” and the simultaneously centripetal-centrifugal waves of globalization, virtual reality, social networking sites and an overwhelming sense of loneliness beneath the media-controlled alienation.
In light of apparent insurmountable differences continuously widening, radical paradigm shifts are necessary which impose a self-aware distancing from prevailing worldviews and their slow, soft replacement with existential visions centered upon cooperation, compassion and warmth among humans instead of relentless progress, brutal competition and compulsive retaliation. Practical suggestions of the new existential visions can already be found in everyday practices of self-soothing and self-regulation, promoted by benevolent expressions of quotidian liberation, communication and, for better or for worse, consumption.