ZUKUNFT ISSUE – Numéro Berlin https://www.numeroberlin.de Tue, 18 Feb 2025 11:12:37 +0000 en-US hourly 1 #ZUKUNFT: “TRANSCENDENCE AND DIVINITY: DELIA GONZALEZ” https://www.numeroberlin.de/2025/02/zukunft-transcendence-and-divinity-delia-gonzalez/ Mon, 17 Feb 2025 09:23:49 +0000 https://www.numeroberlin.de/?p=57676

Delia Gonzalez’s exhibition, “Fassbinder Has Wings, Fassbinder Can Fly,” showcased at Hot Wheels Athens, serves as an exploration of divinity and the human experience within the context of prevalent technological odysseys. During a recent conversation with Gonzalez in Rome, we delved into the intricate web that connects aesthetics, our innate yearning for divinity, and our ceaseless quest to transcend the present. The exhibition sets a glamorous scene, reproducing the Athens Polytechnic interior design, as Gonzalez investigates whether these aspirations are inherently tied to our quest for higher ideals.

Delia Gonzalez is a Cuban American artist known for her multi-disciplinary approach, spanning film, sculpture, drawing, painting, choreography, dance and performance. Her artistic practice often explores themes of spirituality, identity, cinematic histories, and the interplay between the physical, mystical and metaphysical realms. Additionally, she is recognized as a musician and composer, having collaborated with artist Gavin Russom under the name “Black Leotard Front” and released music with DFA Records.

Gonzalez’s recent solo show drew inspiration from the characteristic decadence of 1970s sci-fi imagery—a vision of a grandiose future from her childhood alongside the dystopian realities depicted in films throughout that era. Her fascination with such cinematic aesthetics, particularly the slickness of 1970s science fiction, has shaped shared perceptions of our future, as well as the ongoing pursuit of technological sanctity, redefining the devotional qualities informing our present technological existence.

Her exhibition, “Fassbinder Has Wings, Fassbinder Can Fly,” was inspired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film, World On A Wire, which delves into the concept of simulated reality, where advanced computer programs create virtual worlds inhabited by artificial intelligence. The protagonist, Fred Stiller, is a scientist working on a simulation project, and as he journeys deeper into the artificial world, he begins to question the nature of reality and the boundaries between the virtual and the real. Gonzalez’s interest in the film touches upon themes of the self, individuality, as well as the impact of societal reflections and repetitions on our journey towards self-discovery. Interconnected with technological development, attaining divinity is timeless and surpasses generations. For her, the potential to break free from the repetitive cycle of our reality is a complicated feat which allows her to usher in more surrealist takes grown out of such realities.

Gonzalez tells me about the surreal and recurring mimicking scenarios that she has witnessed in social situations throughout her life, where people mirror one another, sparking a dialogue on individuality, consciousness, and the profound impact of technology, specifically, AI. She introduces an inescapable metaphor—the mirror—as an insignia of human behavior, denoting a conformity of emulation.

Enacting simulation is intrinsic to human behavior, Gonzalez explains to me, and the synchronous influence that AI evokes is just a technological resolution of understanding the self as a copy of another. For this exhibition, Gonzalez also introduces the idea of the mirror as a symbol of human behavior: how humans often mimic and mirror each other, raising questions about individuality and consciousness as they correlate with technology. She is interested in whether modern technology and AI are pushing us towards a cycle of repetition, ultimately leading humanity back to a position where something begins, arises, or is derived from—a repetitive copy of itself in an object-like imitation of a situation or process.

This can be understood as a feedback loop, helping us to understand complex systems of pattern recognition outcomes and how such patterns might shape the processes of human behavior in the future. A feedback loop is a system or process where the output or result of a particular action or behavior is fed back into the system as input, influencing or modifying subsequent actions or behaviors. In simpler terms, it is a self-regulating mechanism where the consequences of an action affect future iterations of that action. While mirroring alludes to self-awareness, introspection, or illusion, feedback loops describe self-regulation, self-correction, or patterns in complex systems.

In a world shaped by technology masquerading as artificial intelligence, the concept of divinity takes on new dimensions. Are we headed towards a higher understanding of ourselves, or are we losing touch with the spiritual realm? Is divinity a purely spiritual concept, or does it also entail a connection to a higher power? This interplay between divinity, AI, technology, and human existence underpinned by the allure and significance of aesthetics, perfection, and a longing for the past in shaping our perceptions of the future is evident throughout Gonzalez’s work. Gonzalez provocatively questions whether we are moving closer to divinity or losing touch with it. She touches upon themes of the self, individuality, as well as the impact of societal reflections of futurity and repetitions in the journey towards self-discovery.

Delia Gonzalez incorporates a digitally rendered and synthy soundscape of two similar sounding tracks that play alongside the formica replicas of the Polytechnic Athens’ interior structures, encapsulating the mood of the lobby’s design located just across the road from the gallery. This sort of mirroring blurs the boundaries between capturing a nostalgic, idealized vision of the future reminiscent of the glitzy 1970s films like Fassbinder’s  “World on a Wire.” The allure of glamor and perfection are reiterated in this show, prompting contemplation as to whether these aspirations are intrinsically tied to our quest for higher ideals.  “Fassbinder Has Wings, Fassbinder Can Fly” explores the essence of transcendence and divinity in Gonzalez’s symbolic use of the mirror, constellated as panel-portals throughout the installation, and its imposing role in our relentless pursuit for power and self-reflection in the digital age. At its most basic understanding, the human characteristics that we ascribe to technology.

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#ZUKUNFT: IN CONVERSATION WITH COOKING SECTIONS https://www.numeroberlin.de/2025/02/zukunft-in-conversation-with-cooking-sections/ Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:22:14 +0000 https://www.numeroberlin.de/?p=57587

Artist duo Cooking Sections’ work combines art and activism, using food as a gateway to explore the social, cultural and political drivers of the climate crisis. Founded in 2012 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, Cooking Sections incorporates design, architecture and community work to create works that defy simple categorization. In their multi-site project CLIMAVORE, they examine how climate change has eliminated traditional seasons, instead identifying the new ‘seasons’ of the climate crises: periods of drought, oceanic pollution and soil depletion. Yet their work also explores potential solutions, looking at how we can create adaptive and regenerative forms of food production. Thus, rather than just working with temporary installations, their practice actively seeks to create frameworks that can be continued in a local context after an exhibition is over. This incorporated solution aspect offers a much-needed glimmer of optimism in a struggle where many of us can find ourselves feeling powerless. Their work is not about the individual choices we make, but about facing the structural issues that are accelerating the climate emergency, and encourage us to demand change by those in power.

Johanne Björklund Larsen: The term ‘climavore’ frequently appears in your practice. Could you tell me a bit more about it?

Cooking Sections: It’s a term we coined in 2015 to think of different systems and how to use food to understand them. We use food to understand those systems and how they are adapting to the new seasons of the climate crisis. It starts from the idea that the seasons that we grew up with have become or are becoming more and more obsolete. For example, when you go to the supermarket, you find pretty much anything all year round because of these standardized and intensive ways of producing food. So we started thinking about what it would mean to eat according to the new seasons that are being generated by humans because of the industrialization of the world. Like a season of drought or a season of polluted oceans or a season of flash floods. And that’s when we started thinking of these possible ingredients, variations that on the one hand are becoming more common in places they were not before, but at the same time also possible scenarios we can imagine to address them.

“Too often, the responsibility of a malfunctioning of a system is put on people’s individual habits instead of thinking more systemically.”
JBL: It’s a common saying that food brings people together. What do you think is the power that food holds?

CS: Well, I think for us, more than the convivial aspect – which is also important for us – it is more about how to think of food as an infrastructure, especially thinking about systemic change at the levels of governance as well as policy-making and how to bring different allies into these struggles towards food justice. And to do that, we like to operate at different levels. Of course, people get together to eat and it’s very important. But even if that sometimes becomes part of our work, the focus is more on infrastructural change that doesn’t stay at the level of the individual. Too often, the responsibility of a malfunctioning of a system is put on people’s individual habits instead of thinking more systemically. For example, why are food corporations allowed to use certain pesticides and then make people pay three times more in the supermarket for food that doesn’t have those chemicals or poison? We want to put more emphasis on those layers, not only on the conviviality of people getting together and eating nice food.

JBL: Food inhabits this interesting duality. It is something we all engage with and for most of us, it has strong emotional connections. Yet, at the same time, it is also an extremely polarized subject. What do you think of this connection between the two? And do you think that this duality is why it’s such an effective platform for discussing these issues?

CS: It has also been made polarized, right? People grew up with it for centuries and it was something very embedded in everyday life. But because of the industrialization of food, especially after the Second World War, more and more people have become disconnected from food and food has become more disconnected from landscapes and the natural seasons because of different so-called technological modernizations. But that has also created a whole series of problems. And that’s where we think this divide appeared. It has become really politicized and, actually, should be even more politicized because it’s a real struggle. Food production is now driven by corporate profit, like many other extractive industries in the world. There is that gap that needs to be bridged. And it’s not easy.

JBL: Another thing I think is really interesting with your work, is that you bring up issues that a lot of people might not at first think of as food-related, such as decreasing fertility rates. Why do you think art is an effective tool for highlighting these connections?

CS: For us, it’s important to use cultural platforms to, on the one hand, raise awareness about these connections, while it is also very important to imagine a new, possible future. We need to start thinking about how we can end some of these extractive practices or toxic ways of farming. And to do that, we need to imagine better worlds. Which is what we try to do in our work, to pick some of these cases or stories from our research and then amplify them. For instance, one particular case is the whole body of work around farmed salmon and the synthetic colors that are used to pigment the flesh of the fish. The fish are grown in intensive farms underwater and because of deficiencies in their industrialized diet, their flesh doesn’t turn pink, the way people expect them to look. So, artificial coloring is used to compensate for it. In this particular case, we use the illusion of color to expose and reveal how the production of farmed fish creates serious new problems. It is not just an aesthetic problem in terms of color, but that fake color that is illustrative of the problem with the entire system.

“In order to make food affordable and to feed the world, some of these very intensive and toxic practices have been heavily subsidized by governments without thinking of the long-term future of the soil or the long-term future of our bodies.”
JBL: With the increase of industrialized food production, we have also somehow moved ourselves further and further away from nature and the climate, leading us to the current toxic spiral we are finding ourselves in. Do you think using food is an effective way of reconnecting with nature?

CS: Definitely. But we first need to understand that we’ve been forced to disconnect. Because people were not disconnected that long ago. We need to think of the externalities. In order to make food affordable and to feed the world, some of these very intensive and toxic practices have been heavily subsidized by governments without thinking of the long-term future of the soil or the long-term future of our bodies. [Our bodies] are becoming increasingly infertile because of exposure to some of the pesticides that are used in to lower the costs of the production of food. So, at what cost does cheap food actually come, at what cost to the environment, at what cost to our bodies? At the moment, cheap food is cheap because of these subsidies to corporate profit-oriented enterprises, but also because it doesn’t take into account the long-term effects and who is doing what with those externalities. If you were to include the price of cleaning the waterways from pesticides, would it be that cheap then? The problem is that those costs are not included in the price of food. For us, it’s about making these connections visible. It’s not people deciding to disconnect from food, it is enterprises that have been severing those connections.

JBL: Do you see any positive changes on a broader scale, food and agricultural-wise?

CS: Yes, of course. There are a lot of farmers that are doing incredible work in many parts of the world, who try to resist those corporate structures and still take care of the land and the soil for future generations. And there’s a lot of initiatives. I think the problem sometimes is that they feel that society demands a lot from them in terms of ecology, but no one is really supporting them in the way that some of these more industrialized food production systems are subsidized. So, on the one hand, they have to bear the risks of failure because sometimes the weather doesn’t help, especially if you don’t use chemicals to mitigate. And, on the other hand, it’s a social responsibility they feel that people demand from them. That is a huge psychological load to carry. There needs to be more support for long-term visions and for food production that takes care of both humans and the soil.

JBL: What do you think would be ways of supporting farmers like this, both on a bigger scale and on a more personal level?

CS: Demanding more infrastructural change. Governments should support, for instance, open source seeds without copyright or patents by multinational corporations so that farmers don’t need to pay for seeds that are climate resilient. We need to have open source seeds for farmers so they can decide on their future and what they want to grow without paying because that’s how humanity has always been. Another infrastructural change we need to demand from government: Think of when we go to the supermarket. We are put in a personal quandary and a financial bind, where we have to choose if we want to pay three times more not to be poisoned, instead of the government just banning these pesticides from the start. These kinds of choices are then up to people’s habits and the information they have instead of governments and corporations taking the responsibility.

JBL: It’s horrible because it becomes a class question if you can afford to not poison yourself.

CS: Exactly.

JBL: Your work lies in the intersection of art, food and agriculture. It’s a combination that is not very common. Why do you think that is?

CS: It’s hard to say… We just believe in the work we are interested in and it doesn’t have to do with being more or less common. We love allies. We’d like to have more allies and people do it more at work. But yeah, there are many issues in the world and each one focuses inwards.

JBL: What do you think the food of the future will look and taste like?

CS: We’ve been working a lot within the climate framework and thinking about the future seasons. For instance, in a season of drought and there is a lack of water or water scarcity, let’s think of more drought-resistant crops. Or if there is a season of soil exhaustion because so many chemicals have been applied that the soil is dead, what kinds of rotation of crops can nourish the soil in the same way that we nourish our bodies? These are the kinds of ingredients we try to find, but we also look at ways of growing them that support ecological systems, not just addressing the ingredients themselves.

JBL: What are some examples of these ingredients and food that you see becoming more common in the future?

CS: We need to familiarize ourselves with the local plants that are available. For example, in the south of Italy, there are all of these wild plants, nut trees and varieties of vegetables that don’t require irrigation. So, on the one hand, familiarize ourselves with them, and then create a demand.

JBL: Are there any useful or environmentally friendly ingredients that most of us are not aware of that you think should get more attention?

CS: Again, that depends on where you live and where you are. For example, on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, where we did the project on farmed salmon, we’ve been working a lot with alternative aquaculture, mainly oysters, mussels and seaweeds that contribute to oxygenated water as they grow. Seaweed, for instance, is an ingredient that in Scotland had been used for generations but has been forgotten, especially since industrialized food production started after the Second World War. We look at how to recover some of these cultural legacies for the sake of history, but also as foods for the future. They are incredible sources of protein and many other compounds that our bodies need, but have been disregarded. So, it is crucial to reconnect with these ingredients, but it all depends on where you live and what the main issue at stake is. For example, if you live on the coast and you have fish farms nearby, how can you transition to alternative aquaculture? If you’re in an area that is experiencing increasing drought, how can you grow vegetables that do not require irrigation? And so on.

JBL: We’ve talked about the big structural changes that need to happen for a sustainable future. But do you have any advice for change that people can implement on an individual level? Because I think a lot of people are looking for ways to have a positive impact but don’t really know where to start and what to do.

CS: What we can do is to ask questions, ask yourself why is this available? Why is this not available? It’s a lot about information and talking to people and thinking. For example, if you are in a dry environment affected by drought, look at why there are not so many ingredients that respond to drought. Because the moment you start pulling the thread and tracing it, then you understand all the actors that are involved, and then you can demand change. It’s not easy to do it on an individual level. But, we have to because it’s our everyday life and we need to constantly make good choices. And there is a lot of work to be done on a wider, infrastructure level.

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#ZUKUNFT: “IS THE BED HALF FULL OR HALF EMPTY?” IN CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTOPHER HARTMANN https://www.numeroberlin.de/2025/02/zukunft-is-the-bed-half-full-or-half-empty-in-conversation-with-christopher-hartmann/ Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:00:52 +0000 https://www.numeroberlin.de/?p=57560 “Just because a bed is empty, doesn’t mean it can’t be filled with longing.”

The creased and draped linens in Christopher Hartmann’s most recent show at Blum and Poe Gallery in Los Angeles use human imprints rather than the figures themselves to tell stories and play with the idea of opposites. The 30-year-old artist dives into domestic messes, using piles of clothes like a Rorschach test and celebrating the joy of four white socks peeking out from under a duvet. Catching up with the artist on his way back to London, Hartmann speaks on longing, belonging and growing into subtlety.

Angela Waters: Fabrics play a large role across your Nightswimming exhibition, how did your eye turn towards textiles?

Christopher Hartmann: The initial starting point was the first lockdown in 2020. My previous work was very figure-heavy, about flesh and skin. All my work is staged to a certain degree, I take photographs before I paint. During the lockdown, I wasn’t able or allowed to take images of people, that’s when I became more interested in clothes and suggesting a certain presence through the absence of figures. I was staring at a pile of clothes at home and noticed the movement of the fabrics and impression of the body.

The first room in my exhibition is just empty bed sheets, empty beds — what I am most interested in is the absence of the body, to suggest with an imprint of a body that a body was there. With the fabrics, it creates a different type or relationship between the paintings and the viewer. Through the fabrics and textiles, the viewer can interpret the motif I am portraying through their own experience.

Although you portray a lot of empty rooms, they are always very lived in, verging on messy, with unmade beds and piles of rumpled clothing. Do you identify as a messy person?

I am a controlled messy person. Not to reinforce stereotypes, but I’m a typical Capricorn, and on top of that I am German — always in control. My studio can get messy sometimes, but I have it under control. At a certain point, I have to clean. I also don’t mind mess, as long as it is my mess and I have some kind of overview of it, but if it is somebody else’s mess, I do get a bit crazy about it.

The pile of clothes I paint are very staged and composed – I spend hours on them. Some of my scenes are more natural states, but they exist in a place between staged and natural. Very often, a still life starts with me seeing something on the floor or on the couch. I then take a few pictures and start to remove or add something to make an interesting composition. I am aware that the end goal is painting.

When you do paint figures, it is most often men. Is there a reason behind it, or a particular stance you have on the subject?

As a man, it feels like the most authentic thing I can do: paint men and show things from my perspective. If you had asked me three or four years ago, I would have told you that my work is a reflection of my belief that there aren’t any fixed ideas of masculinity, but in 2023, I don’t think so much about gender norms.

There is a certain vulnerability and tenderness to the paintings, which is in contrast to a traditional sense of masculinity — but it’s not a groundbreaking new idea. For me, tenderness, vulnerability and masculinity go hand in hand. These aspects are intrinsically human, regardless of gender, sex or whatever. It is the way I am and how I relate to people in my life.

“I had just moved into a new flat in London and the starting point of that was me just staring into an empty bed. The idea of starting over was heartbreaking.”
You said that you’ve had a shift in thinking when it comes to proactively using your work to make a statement on masculinity. Do you think you’ve changed, or your environment?

Obviously, I can’t separate myself from my environment. I grew up in Bavaria, in an ultra-Catholic environment, so I am aware of the traditional view of masculinity. But maybe it is tied to leaving home. Sometimes I wonder if I am in a bubble, living in London, in the art world, thinking that people are very openminded and less fixated on certain ideas.

With this shift in thinking, how has the change manifested in your work?

Five years ago, I was pushing ideas of sexuality and masculinity. But now, my work has become a bit more supple and tender. Maybe this also has to do with age. There is something about the subtleness that I find more interesting, showing more, but being less explicit.

My most recent work in LA was about longing and belonging and exploring the idea of home. I had just moved into a new flat in London and the starting point of that was me just staring into an empty bed. The idea of starting over was heartbreaking. I was staring at the bed and thinking about where you sleep at night and where you define your home.

Now, I am much more interested in abstraction. Instead of painting a person who looks nostalgic or painting a fleshy intimate scene, I am interested in depicting atmospheres that express nostalgia or show an intimate state of mind.

Still, if abstraction helps portray emotional concepts, do you still have use for flesh and people in your paintings?

I am interested in that duality — absence points towards a presence and a presence points towards an absence. Each provokes something different in the viewer. You can very much relate to an empty bed, and it can be very confronting, but two figures are much more explicit, much more specific, and about interpretations of the poses and action. But I like telling stories across this juxtaposition.

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#ZUKUNFT: “IS QUANTUM COMPUTING CHANGING OUR FUTURE?” – IN CONVERSATION WITH CARLO ROVELLI https://www.numeroberlin.de/2025/02/zukunft-is-quantum-computing-changing-our-future-in-conversation-with-carlo-rovelli/ Mon, 03 Feb 2025 14:00:57 +0000 https://www.numeroberlin.de/?p=57204

Who better to ask about what the future holds than one of the architects of the ongoing intellectual revolution? Dubbed the ‘‘poet of physics,’’ renowned theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli spent decades deciphering the complex laws of the unseen world. Moreover, with the help of philosophy, epistemology and a pinch of literary flair, he makes quantum theory graspable, selling millions of books around the world. His latest offering, Helgoland, retraces the journey of quantum theory from its pioneers like Schrödinger, Born, Dirac, Einstein and Heisenberg, a centenary scientific and philosophical revolution with daily applications shaping our present and future lives. Although already 100 years old, quantum theory still holds many secrets and mysteries to unfold in years to come. Quantum computing is sold to us as the new promising tech frontier. But it’s also an ongoing evolution in paradigm that affects our perception of the world. Could changing our vision of the universe be the key to a better future? A conversation with the discoverer of loop quantum gravity theory.

Marie Dapoigny: What was the most formative moment from your early years hitchhiking, one you can still relate to, to this day?

Carlo Rovelli: The sense of freedom, liberty, possibility of taking my life in my hands, and not being constrained by what everybody else thinks or expects from me, has been the best experience and the legacy those years left with me.

MD: You previously mentioned that trying psychedelics back then was what sparked your interest in physics. Can you describe that experience and how it changed your vision of reality?

CR: It did not really spark my interest in physics. Rather, it left me with a large number of unsolved and puzzling questions in my mind. If the perception of reality can be altered so easily, how do we really trust our usual perception? It left me with a sense that reality could perhaps be quite different from what our standard intuition suggests, and with a great curiosity to learn more.

MD: Can you explain how quantum mechanics change the old materialist way of thinking about the world?

CR: It makes materialism less naive. The world is not just a bunch of little stones bumping against each other. It is formed by more subtle structures, relations and interactions. This is not a step back from materialism to idealism or spiritualism. It is a step forward in understanding the physical nature of reality.

MD: It’s been about 100 years since its inception, yet quantum theory is still very counterintuitive for a lot of people. How can we improve the way we think about quantum?

CR: 100 years after Copernicus wrote his book, with the idea that the Earth spins, this idea was still unconceivable and dramatically counterintuitive for almost everybody. It takes time to digest the deep, new things we learn about reality. In addition, the specialists, the scientists themselves, are not yet in real agreement about how to best think about the new discovery. No surprise then if everybody else is confused as well. My book Helgoland is entirely on this issue.

MD: You also said in Helgoland that we should abandon the idea of a “world made up of things.” What is reality made of, once one has grasped quantum theory?

CR: The thesis developed in the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, and which is described in Helgoland, is that we may better understand the world as a network of interacting processes rather than a collection of entities, or “things.” This means that entities can only be understood from the way they interact, and as evolving in time; entities in isolation do not make sense.

“The risk is of human stupidity, not artificial intelligence.”
MD: Some physical phenomena, including some you have observed in your books, may seem rather illogical. Does a part of adopting quantum theory mean letting go of a world that logically makes sense, that we have a grasp of?

CR: It is not logic that is challenged by quantum phenomena. It is common sense. What is challenged is the normal view of reality made by things that have their properties. A stone is a piece of rock that is somewhere, has a weight, a velocity if it moves, its own color, and so on. This intuitive view of reality is only an approximation. A stone is a very complicated phenomenon: It is a momentary coming together of configurations of quantum fields… It looks static for the same reason the Earth looks like a boring, static blue rock when seen from the moon.

MD: We live in an increasingly tech-driven, specialized world that is increasingly hard to understand. Some even fear the development of AI without control may lead to the end of humanity…

CR: I do not think that the fear that the development of AI without control may lead to the end of humanity is justified. That an AI machine launches a nuclear war is far more unlikely than a human being launching nuclear weapons (they have already done so). I have a much higher level of distrust in humans than in AI. Nobody is going to give much power to AI at present, and AI is not going to grasp power by itself. That is science fiction. Have you tried to use the chat bots? They are plainly stupid. They are better than humans in some specific tasks, but so are washing machines. The risk is of human stupidity, not artificial intelligence.

MD: What are the most exciting fields of quantum theory today?

CR: In my opinion, definitely quantum gravity. The problem of making sense of the quantum property of space itself and time itself. We have tentative theories that do this: The most developed is called loop quantum gravity, but we are not sure if they are right, because they are incomplete and we have not been able to test them.

MD: How does one go from quantum mechanics to quantum thought?

CR: I do not think that there is a specific “quantum thinking.” Rather, I think that quantum mechanics helps us to see the limits of certain notions or ideas that we take for granted. For instance, the idea that the best way to think about the world is always to think in terms of “objects,” or “things.” Often, relations come before things.

MD: Should science be more collaborative and work in tandem with philosophy?

CR: Of course. It is simple to see: The best science and the best philosophy of the past have come from people in the two disciplines that were listening to one another.

MD: How can the quantum way of thinking (relationally) be applied to other fields, like politics? Is this something that you witness in the world around you?

CR: We already think in terms of relations very often. We know that a human being, a biological species, a chemical element are determined and defined by how they interact with whatever is around.

MD: Is quantum thinking the opposite to what you described as “tribal thinking”?

CR: What I call “tribal thinking” is unfortunately a very common way of thinking today. It is the mistake that we make when we think that our best interest is for our group to prevail. We fail to see that our best interest is for our group to better and more effectively collaborate, to find common ground to find compromises, and search for the win-win solution. Sometimes, this mistake has dramatic consequences. Every war is the result of this stupidity happening on both sides.

MD: It is hard not to draw an analogy between the core principles of relational interpretation and the current status quo in our contemporary cultures, where the public debate is contaminated by “alternative facts” and relativism. How may quantum theory actually affect our notion of the truth?

CR: The public debate has always been contaminated by alternative facts. When I was younger, during the height of the Cold War, the world was split in two opposite narratives, each considering the other “alternative facts.” I had the privilege of growing up in a country where both were strong, and got a bit vaccinated against the absurdities of both. At the times of the American Revolution, the Indian Wars, or the French Revolution, it was the same, I think. For sure, nowadays it is the same: People live in their own narratives, on each side of the debates, everybody deeply convinced to have truth and justice on their side. I do not think that quantum theory has anything to do with that. Truth is complicated, never easy. We get closer to it, with time, humility, listening to our enemies, and being honest with ourselves. We are never at any final truth, but sincere debates do end up clarifying who is right and who is wrong, on many topics. So, often reasonable people end up agreeing. This is how the entire immense body of knowledge on which our civilization flourishes was slowly built, along the millennia.

MD: Could quantum thinking help us protect the environment, for example, by thinking more relationally about our place within ecosystems?

CR: To protect the environment, it suffices to be reasonable, which we are not. We do not need quantum thinking. We need not to be bamboozled by the special interests that resist implementing the changes we need. And, again, we need to invest resources in the common problems of humankind, rather than trying to prevail upon one another.

MD: Quantum computing is one of the new tech frontiers, and is sold to us as full of promises, receiving huge investment from governments around the world. What can we really expect from it in the near future? Do you see any current limitations to the technology?

CR: I think that it is an interesting possibility, but there is too much hype around it. I doubt all the promises will be kept.

MD: You said in a previous interview there was eventually a sense of “losing the revolution” for the hippie and countercultural movements of your youth. Could quantum thinking be a new graspable revolution, one of paradigm, which could make us all better human beings, i.e. more openminded and collaborative?

CR: I am afraid that is asking too much from quantum physics. We have a chance of becoming better human beings by stopping being predators as we are at the international level towards one another. Quantum physics has nothing to offer. It is up to us to be reasonable. A bit wiser than what we are.

MD: What are you most scared of for the upcoming years to come?

CR: The coming war between the US and China. Seems that the US is desperately trying to go into it.

MD: And what are you looking forward to the most?

CR: The moment in which the people in power will realize that their task is not to make one country or one system prevail. It is to build a peaceful and collaborative world, and address the common problems of humankind: the ecological crises, extreme poverty, the dramatic economical inequalities, diseases…

MD: I sense a change in conversations around us, where people increasingly now prefer to think more along a “spectrum” of realities rather than using binary thinking. Do you think this evolution may signal a step in the right direction?

CR: I appreciate your optimism. Maybe because I am older, I see people demonizing our countries, spending much more on the military, preparing for war. Forgetting the good “no more war” ideal of the past. I hope to be wrong and that you are right.

MD: You previously said in an interview: “If I ruled the world, I would preach indiscipline.” Is there any irreverence and freedom in quantum thinking?

CR: There certainly was when quantum theory was conceived. It was conceived by a group of very young people, in their twenties, full of courage, irreverence and freedom. Now, quantum theory is an old lady, it is 98 years old.

MD: As students, we often study physics focusing on menial details instead of offering perspective, i.e. the cultural paradigms that shape our understanding of the world. Should we teach epistemology in school?

CR: Yes, definitely. We should teach the history of science. To see how painfully we came to know the little we know. We should also teach history from the perspectives of others. It is astonishing how each country teaches its students a version of history totally different from the other countries. So, everybody ends up believing they are in the only reasonable place on the planet. And we do not understand each other anymore. And we kill one another, as we are doing routinely.

MD: This is maybe off-piste, but something that creeps up regularly in creative circles: Do you feel like LSD – amongst other psychedelics – entices humans to see the world in a more quantum manner?

CR: It certainly may give us a sense that the world may well be stranger than we thought. And quantum theory for sure tells us that the world is indeed stranger than we thought.

MD: Is the future quantum?

CR: Nature is quantum. This is a fact. Like the fact that the Earth is spinning. It will be quantum in the future, it is quantum now, and it was quantum in the past. We have just learned this, and it is in this sense that we have entered a quantum world.

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#ZUKUNFT: “THE FUTURE BECOMES YOU” – WORDS BY LIAM CAGNEY https://www.numeroberlin.de/2025/01/zukunft-the-future-becomes-you-words-by-liam-cagney/ Wed, 22 Jan 2025 09:00:49 +0000 https://www.numeroberlin.de/?p=57062

If, like me, you’re a techno head—wedded to dark dancefloors, addicted to sonorous strangeness—chances are, you’ve heard of the book Future Shock. Published in 1970, penned by husband-and-wife duo Alvin and Heidi Toffler (herein, when I say “Toffler,” I mean both authors) and selling millions of copies, Future Shock is a book that Detroit techno’s founding group Cybotron read and which supposedly fired their artistic imaginations. “Alvin Toffler’s book is a kind of bible to Detroit’s new musical revolutionaries,” noted John McCready in 1988 in the NME (indulging in hyperbole).

The term techno was already bouncing around the global musical grid by the early 1980s. But the term’s appearance in Toffler’s follow-up book, The Third Wave, chimed with and validated the emerging electronic music genre: “The techno rebels are, whether they recognize it or not, agents of the third wave,” wrote Toffler. “They will not vanish but multiply in the years ahead. For they are as much a part of the advance to a new stage of civilization as our missions to Venus, our amazing computers, our biological discoveries, or our explorations of the oceanic depths.” A seductive idea, but decades later, how does it fare? In this jaded age of ours, while our planet burns and the dancefloor distracts, what can Future Shock still tell us?
Future visions always reflect the person doing the prediction. For the tweedy English gentleman Arthur C. Clarke, the future is about humanity’s imperial encounters in outer space. For the drug-addled vagabond Philip K. Dick, the future means inane advertisements being beamed directly into your brain and not knowing whether or not you’re actually real. For the Queer Black outsider Octavia Butler, the future involves the mutant biological blending of humans and aliens. These are science fiction authors, but between science fiction and futurist analysis, there’s a fine line, with speculation in common.
Toffler was of the privileged class of WASPs, well educated and with a background in business and journalism. Future Shock reads like the jottings of a lofty MD, the type of sensible doctor who golfs on the weekends at the country club, the trusty gent to whom concerned postwar American parents turned when their little son Billy began exhibiting worrying signs of unsavouy homosexual urges, and who would sagely prescribe Billy a thorough course of electroshock therapy. “The basic thrust of this book is diagnosis,” Toffler writes, guiding Americans through the worrying world of tomorrow.

Toffler as guide describes built-in obsolescence, modular architecture, consumerist fads, style tribes, unorthodox families. Toffler describes how we will live under the sea, weather manipulation on a global scale, “research into communication between man and dolphin,” generating new species of bacteria, synthetic body parts, cloning, choosing your embryo’s sex and personality, cyborgs. The future is a disconcerting concatenation of phenomena arising, more or less, from the revolutions in communications technology, which Toffler diagnoses and prognosticates upon.
A notable feature of Future Shock is its air of seductive exoticism. “We who explore the future are like those ancient mapmakers,” Toffler writes proudly, savoring “new realities, filled with danger and promise, created by the accelerative thrust.” The future is a strange country full of unsettling customs. As such, Future Shock is at times an escape from a mundane present into a world of romantic fantasy, of teleportation, telepathy, cloning, eternal life, bodily augmentation: futurist analysis as a branch of supernatural literature.

Future Shock is also prescient. It accurately foresees the so-called experience economy (“One important class of experiential products will be based on simulated environments that offer the customer a taste of adventure, danger, sexual titillation or other pleasure without risk to his real life or reputation”—escape rooms, Meta and so on), remarking correctly that it “is clearly foreshadowed in the participatory techniques now being pioneered in the arts” (such as hippie happenings). In art, Future Shock observes a shift away from the classical arts towards immersive multisensory experiences: “Artists also have begun to create whole ‘environments’—works of art into which the audience may actually walk, and inside which things happen… The artists who produce these are really ‘experiential engineers.’” Which is basically the 2020s techno club.

“The future is like a weird alien virus infecting the public body, mutating all the cells of human society, rendering alien and dysmorphic the human self as hitherto known.”

Much of Future Shock is a lengthy footnote to the 1960s cultural revolution. “There are rich men who playact poverty, computer programmers who turn on with LSD. There are anarchists who, beneath their dirty denim shirts, are outrageous conformists, and conformists who, beneath their button-down collars, are outrageous anarchists. There are married priests and atheist ministers and Jewish Zen Buddhists… There are Playboy Clubs and homosexual movie theaters… amphetamines and tranquilizers… anger, affluence, and oblivion. Much oblivion.” The future is like a weird alien virus infecting the public body, mutating all the cells of human society, rendering alien and dysmorphic the human self as hitherto known.

Placating us, taking seriously their self-appointed job to tell us what all this means, Toffler presents this explosion of the future as a surface symptom of a deep structural change, the transition from one technological age to another. For Toffler, humanity has been defined by three waves: The first wave was agrarian humanity; the second wave was industrial humanity; and the third wave—the future exploding so strangely around us—is superindustrial humanity. Others have called the latter post-Fordist or postindustrial society, an economy no longer based on manufacturing but on services, no longer based on things but on information, a globalized world networked by information technology.

“The inhabitants of the earth are divided not only by race, nation, religion or ideology, but also, in a sense, by their position in time.”

“The inhabitants of the earth are divided not only by race, nation, religion or ideology, but also, in a sense, by their position in time,” Future Shock states. “Examining the present populations of the globe, we find a tiny group who still live, hunting and food-foraging, as men did millennia ago. Others, the vast majority of mankind, depend not on bear-hunting or berry-picking, but on agriculture.” In this view, all wars are effectively wars between different waves. Toffler describes the West as a system in a state of disequilibrium, waiting to settle again into a steady state. Adaptation will be key, informed by understanding.

Toffler is particularly focused on how modern society’s exhausting sense of endless transience affects our sense of self and of social connections. For Toffler, the twentieth century Western world’s explosion of consumer goods is one of the main indices for the third wave’s accelerated rate of change. We ourselves might measure the changing rate of change through the ubiquity of smartphones, the personal computers through which we mediate and zombify ourselves. Only ten years ago, not everyone had one, but now, it seems unimaginable that things were ever any different. The rapid change could not but leave some feeling existentially fraught, daunted by how suddenly our inner lives have been surrendered to surveillance capitalism.

“Future shock is the “shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.””

Which brings in Toffler’s most famous concept, the titular future shock. “Future shock,” Toffler writes, is the “shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” The neologism is coined by analogy with culture shock, what happens to a Westerner when they fly to a far-flung place and throw themselves into a completely foreign culture, Delhi, say, to head-spinning effect. Psychologist Sven Lundstedt defined culture shock as a “form of personality maladjustment which is a reaction to a temporarily unsuccessful attempt to adjust to new surroundings and people.” Expanding on this, Toffler defines future shock as “what happens when the familiar psychological cues that help an individual to function in society are suddenly withdrawn and replaced by new ones that are strange or incomprehensible.’

For the future-shocked person, “the strange society may itself be changing only very slowly, yet for him it is all new. Signs, sounds and other psychological cues rush past him before he can grasp their meaning. The entire experience takes on a surrealistic air. Every word, every action is shot through with uncertainty. In this setting, fatigue arrives more quickly than usual.” Acceleration, change and adaptation are key concepts assumed by this framework. Through providing an explanation of what’s going on at a deep structural level, Future Shock helps Joe and Jane Middle America adapt and regain stability amidst the typhoon of transformation. “The problem is not, therefore, to suppress change, which cannot be done, but to manage it. If we opt for rapid change in certain sectors of life, we can consciously attempt to build stability zones elsewhere.” And, indeed, to capitalize on it: one of Toffler’s later books is called Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives.

As I close Future Shock’s covers, my main takeaway is a contrary view. I am not a past person forced to live in an environment of the future; I am a future person forced to live within the environment of the past. I have past shock. The tyranny of the everyday—of conventional national identity, sexuality identity, gender identity, personhood at all in the first place—is completely bewildering. It has shocked me my whole life. I do not want to absorb the future into the everyday and thus to tame it: I want to be drained of all pastness and absorbed into a futurity that can never be contained within any earthly roots.

Techno helps me to do that. Within the club’s darkness—through immersion in flickering lights and out-there sounds and rhythms like insect heartbeats—techno envelops you in silence. Then, techno whispers that yes, what you feel despite it all is real, that history is madness and selfhood a fantasy. If a techno set by, say, Jeff Mills provokes shock in us—shock at its relentless strangeness, through its insane electronic loops—it is a shock we should embrace, recognizing as it does our real self, our future self.

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#ZUKUNFT: “THE FUTURE OF THE PAST: THE FATE OF SCREEN HERITAGE IN A DIGITAL WORLD” – WORDS BY HARRY PASEK https://www.numeroberlin.de/2025/01/zukunft-the-future-of-the-past-the-fate-of-screen-heritage-in-a-digital-world-words-by-harry-pasek/ Tue, 21 Jan 2025 12:55:32 +0000 https://www.numeroberlin.de/?p=57093

It is a warm evening in June, and I am sitting in the cinema. The auditorium is full, the audience is a lively and diverse mixture of cinema-goers both young and old, and there is a distinct murmur of excitement in the room. The reason is that we are at the opening night of a new film festival, the BFI Film on Film Festival, at BFI Southbank (British Film Institute) in London.

The festival does what it says on the tin: Every single film screening across a long weekend is being shown on physical film rather than being digitally projected (as is now the norm in almost every cinema in the world). We are waiting to see a print of the classic 1945 melodrama noir, Mildred Pierce, cause for excitement in itself, but this screening is special because we are to view the great film on an original release nitrate print.

Nitrate film is extremely flammable and explosive, to the extent that it can cause catastrophic, lethal damage if mishandled. In May 1897, the Paris Bazaar disaster was caused by a nitrate fire, claiming 126 lives. This terrible event came early in cinema’s history (the first moving images were captured by the Lumière brothers in 1895), and led to a rush of regulation and legislation, as well as technical innovation. By 1948, a non-flammable alternative, acetate safety film, began to supplant its predecessor. This screening of Mildred Pierce is the first screening of a nitrate film print in the UK for a decade, and BFI Southbank is the only venue in the country that can legally screen these increasingly rare and potentially dangerous artefacts.

Robin Baker, the Head Curator of the BFI National Archive and the festival’s lead programmer, steps onto the stage to introduce the new festival and the not-so-new film. As he does so, he looks a little perturbed. Diplomatically, he explains that during testing, the skilled team of projectionists noticed an issue with the projector which meant that safety couldn’t be absolutely guaranteed. There will be no nitrate screening this evening. Handily, however, the BFI has created a brand new 35mm acetate print of the film which can be shown instead. Understandably disappointed, the audience lets the news wash over them. Once the lights go down and the projector whirrs into action, nobody seems to mind.

The moving image is by some distance the most pervasive cultural form in the world. In the smartphone and streaming age, it is everywhere, instantly, all the time. We are exposed to it whether we like it or not. Given the perception of instant access to the entire wealth of human culture, what is a festival like Film on Film trying to achieve? More importantly, why did thousands of people come to view battered old prints of forgotten films on a warm weekend in early summer in London?

In a sense, the answer is simple. Because it is possible to view an awful lot of content wherever and whenever we want, it’s easy to believe that we have access to everything. In truth, we absolutely do not. Though streaming platforms sell us infinite choice, in reality, only a proportionally small handful of the history of cinema is available to view digitally. Most films only exist on celluloid. If you cannot project them on film, you can’t see them at all. The issue goes deeper still: Approximately 80% of all films made before the year 1930 are currently completely lost, unavailable to view in any format. Your average Netflix subscriber may not mourn the loss of the last viewable print of a 1923 German Expressionist oddity, but that’s not to say that it isn’t a valuable historical document, or indeed an important aesthetic statement that deserves preservation.

Almost all of the films shown at the festival came from the extensive collection of the BFI National Archive, one of a number of globally significant film archives, alongside others such as the Cinémathèque Française and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, who preserve, curate and restore screen heritage. Without these organizations, our access to the work of even famous filmmakers would be cast into doubt. In 2012, a project by the BFI National Archive restored Alfred Hitchcock’s first nine silent feature films, none of which were viewable prior to this work.

People want to see films that they can’t see anywhere else, but they also want to experience a film print projected, with an audience, because that is how the filmmaker intended the work to be seen. BFI Film on Film Festival showed a lot of underappreciated classics, but on its closing night, it also screened an original release print of Jaws, complete with the original mono soundtrack. Despite being a film that can absolutely be seen at the click of a button, the screening sold out fast, perhaps because people wanted to experience the film as it had been seen upon release. Through the print they were shown, that audience was linked to the audiences who saw the very same print in the summer of 1978: a continuity of experience through time, transmuted through acetate and light and thrown into the ether.

If a film was made before the turn of the millennium, chances are that the filmmaker shot it on film, and expected the work to be exhibited in cinemas on film prints. A digital rendering is not better or worse than celluloid, but it is crucially different. On film, the focus may be slightly softer, the grain of the image may be more apparent. Over time and with repeated use, slight movements in the frame or imperfections may become visible. Anecdotally, when DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages) began to replace film prints in cinemas, some projectionists thought that there was something wrong with the digital images they were seeing: The sharpness of the image and smoothed movement had rendered the old magic of cinema eerie and uncanny.

There is now a whole generation of film viewers who may never have the opportunity to see a film physically projected. It’s no wonder that demand for this experience is high. While the global casualization of film watching habits continues, it is important for organizations with a platform to advocate for the value of the cinematic experience. Currently, only one other film festival in the world screens exclusively on film: The Nitrate Picture Show, held at the Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York.

As a new generation of cinephiles looks to engage with the history of the medium, perhaps the Film on Film Festival will be the beginning of a broader movement towards an analogue experience of cinema. The festival’s organizers have pointed to the vinyl revival of the last decade as another example of largely young people searching for something authentic, tangible and physical amid the onslaught of digital consumption. The nuanced aesthetic differences between listening to a record and, say, streaming it on Spotify are mirrored in the even richer, audiovisual experience of celluloid film.

Engaging with the materiality of film also raises the question of preservation. As the amount of ‘born digital’ content swells daily, most of it held within a variety of proprietorial fiefdoms, the challenge of how to effectively catalogue and preserve digital moving image materials becomes ever greater. Organizations such as the Internet Archive continue to fight the good fight in preserving digital heritage and advocating for a free and open internet, but while it may have success in doing the former, the dream of open access has largely died.

Many people implicitly believe that preserving digital materials is both easier and safer than preserving physical film or paper collections, for instance, but this is not the case. If Netflix or YouTube were to disappear tomorrow, none of the content they hold would have its safety guaranteed, and could disappear much more easily than an ageing film canister. To begin the hard and ongoing work of countering these risks, the BFI National Archive has struck a deal with major streaming platforms including Netflix and Amazon to preserve key British material from their collections. The agreement ensures that whatever the long-term fate of the companies, these materials will be safe for future generations to interpret. This is the first such deal of its kind globally, but other organizations will be looking to follow suit. As the amount of potentially at-risk content increases, the issue becomes ever more pressing.

Back at the festival, the sometimes precarious balance between preservation and access was thrown into sharp relief by a couple of screenings. One of these was Charlie Shackleton’s The Afterlight. Only one print of this film exists, and it tours cinemas along with its director. Every film print has a finite lifespan, a limited number of times that it can be screened, and by only creating one print of his film, Shackleton plays with our formal expectations of cinema, which, along with still photography, was the first art form to develop with the expectation of indefinite reproduction. By enforcing scarcity, seeing a screening of The Afterlight is to be reminded of the ephemerality of experience, and to leave with a newfound appreciation for the act of watching. It forces the question of how our viewing might differ if we knew we could never see the images again.

To emphasize this point, the screening of 1968’s The Swimmer was determined to be the last time this particular cinematic release print of the film could be publicly exhibited. The print has now returned to the BFI National Archive for safekeeping, but its quality has deteriorated to the point that running the reels through a projector for an audience would carry too high a risk of permanent damage. A cult adaptation of the 1964 short story by John Cheever, starring Burt Lancaster, the festival audience watched the film in the knowledge that no one else would be able to see this particular print ever again.

Both of these screenings point to the increased contextual pleasure, and complexity of emotion, that can be gained from appreciating both the form and content of a physically projected film. The festival celebrated the films themselves and the stories being told. It also served as a timely reminder of the importance of the artefact of the print, and what a specific print (and its story) can bring to the experience of film viewing.

For the disappointed opening night crowd who were denied their nitrate fix, the last day of the festival brought happier news, when the planned nitrate screening of the 1941 Technicolor curio Blood and Sand, starring one Rita Hayworth, went ahead as planned, with no injuries reported. The festival had brought like-minded film lovers together to experience something unique, in many cases, for the first time. One of the most striking observations from across the weekend was the strong and continued presence of younger people, turning out in great numbers to see physical film. Streaming platforms aren’t going anywhere, but neither is the desire to get together and engage with art. The enthusiasm for a communal, analogue experience gives hope for the future of the cinematic experience more broadly: an experience whose obituary has been prematurely written by every generation since its birth.

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