Советский космос (это было завтра)

(i own this book - have yet to dip into very far - Soviet futurologists, scientists, etc circa 1968 imagine the future - not one imagines there'd be no more USSR)

Sammy Slabbinck

these collages remind me a bit of the hypnagogic pop artwork of six, seven years ago

Sammy Slabbinck

"Sammy Slabbinck began buying midcentury magazines in his teens. It was the early Nineties and every weekend he would scour the flea market in his home town of Bruges"

now 38 - "He keeps them in teetering stacks on the top floor of his house. “I have no idea how many I have,” he says, speaking from Bruges. “Thousands perhaps? Many thousands. It’s become an addiction.”

"Playboy and Paris Match offer particularly rich pickings for Slabbinck’s art, as do the many women’s lifestyle titles popular in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. He often combines them with books and encyclopedias from the same period. "They all have, he says, “a certain look and feel, with very strong lines. You can see it in the architecture, the cars, the furniture. But the photography is also completely different: it has a quality which I find very innocent. The colours are faded and warm, the images have a soul. It’s nothing like the photographs you can take now with a super digital camera and millions of pixels. I tried making collages with recent magazines but they just don’t  have the same spirit.”

You don't remember the Hypnagogic Collages of yore?

learn to forget (the Age of Hyperthymesis)

At The Conversation, a short essay by Emma Smith - a professor of Shakespeare Studies - about the memorialisation glut and "the right to be forgotten"

"Three US neuroscientists published a case study in 2005 detailing how a woman... was plagued by memories of her own life and of public events such as the dates of death of Elvis and Princess Diana.... The researchers named this case “hyperthymestic syndrome”, from the Greek thymesis, remembering... It’s clear that we all live in this age of hyperthymesis.... The paradox of the digital future is the burden of the past that we are constantly archiving.

".... Some 78% of theatres digitally preserve and archive their productions by capturing their live productions and make them available online. In this archival process, the word “live” is under some pressure. “Live” streaming of theatrical events into cinemas is morphing towards designing productions specifically for the camera rather than the theatre audience.... The availability of recorded theatre online has increased substantially over the past 18 months: it won’t be long before almost all theatre productions are available online....

"Rather than always looking to record and archive we might want to reinstate the idea that being “live” demands impermanence, ephemerality and forgetting. 

"Forgetting – or half-remembering – is the way we collude with art to make it our own. We construct our own “highlights package” that is unique to our own often faulty memories of an experience....

"Remembering, not forgetting, is the enemy of creative reinvention"

Kurenniemi body out there? (so suomi)

One of the things I was really pleased to squeeze into Retromania was a bit on Erkki Kurenniemi - the Finnish futurist polymath who from the 1960s got involved in a whole range of experimental electronic endeavours involving computers, robotics, music, film and much more - and who had a great documentary made about him, The Future Is Not What It Used To Be by Mika Taanila

So imagine my delight, a few years ago when I made a trip to Finland to stumble quite accidentally on a retrospective exhibition of Kurenniemi's work in multiple media being staged at a big art museum in Helsinki. 

Further increments of delight have now occurred with the news that a collection of essays about Kurenniemi is being published by the MIT Press - Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048, edited by Joasia Krysa and Jussi Parkikka. 

Blurb at MIT: 

"Over the past forty years, Finnish artist and technology pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941) has been a composer of electronic music, experimental filmmaker, computer animator, roboticist, inventor, and futurologist. Kurenniemi is a hybrid—a scientist-humanist-artist. Relatively unknown outside Nordic countries until his 2012 Documenta 13 exhibition, ”In 2048,” Kurenniemi may at last be achieving international recognition. This book offers an excavation, a critical mapping, and an elaboration of Kurenniemi’s multiplicities. 

The contributors describe Kurenniemi’s enthusiastic, and rather obsessive, recording of everyday life and how this archiving was part of his process; his exploratory artistic practice, with productive failure an inherent part of his method; his relationship to scientific and technological developments in media culture; and his work in electronic and digital music, including his development of automated composition systems and his “video-organ,” DIMI-O. A “Visual Archive,” a section of interviews with the artist, and a selection of his original writings (translated and published for the first time) further document Kurenniemi’s achievements. But the book is not just about one artist in his time; it is about emerging media arts, interfaces, and archival fever in creative practices, read through the lens of Kurenniemi."


Had a peruse through Writing and Unwriting and it looks really fascinating stuff 

here's my bit from Retromania for your further enticement and edification:

...  Imagine a Finnish hybrid of Stockhausen, Buckminster Fuller and Steve Jobs--who from the 1960s onwards was a pioneer in electronic music, computing, industrial robotics, instrument invention, and multimedia. Short of presiding over Finland's space programme, he was involved in every aspect of the Future.  Rediscovered and championed by the Finnish techno outfit Pan Sonic, Kurenniemi's clangorous bleepscapes such as "Electronics In the World of Tomorrow" (1964) compare favorably with the avant-classical creations emanating from Paris and Cologne during that time. He was also something of a techno-prophet, talking in the voice-over to 1966's "Computer Music" about how "in the 21st Century people and computers will begin to merge into hyperpersonas. It will be hard to say where man ends and machine begins."

The documentary-- made by director Mika Taanila....  also looks at what became of Kurenniemi in the twilight of his career.  Grey-bearded and careworn, the aging innovator spends most of his time documenting himself. He takes 20 thousand pictures a year, which are carefully touched-up and filed on his computer. He inputs "cassette diaries" he made during the Seventies and records new ones detailing the minutiae of his existence, like the good steak he enjoyed courtesy of a friend.

Why?  Kurenniemi believes that medical advances will virtually eliminate mortality in the not-too-distant future. "Mine is probably the last generation of mortals".  200 years from now, when the greater part of humanity lives off-world, in the asteroids or orbital zones, while the Earth is "a museum planet", he believes that the indolent immortals, confronted by "100, 000 years of uneventful life" and "with nothing else to do but study old archives", may be "genuinely interested in reconstructing the 20th and 21st centuries."  Kurenniemi's "manic registration" of every trivial detail of his life is intended to provide the "core material" for this resurrection project.  In the near-future, it will be possible to do "brain back ups", to download consciousness and personality into a computer. But Kurenniemi  can't count on lasting that long. So, he advises, "we just have to keep every tram ticket and sales slip, and write down or record all our thoughts." Video would make for a better imprint of his consciousness, a document of the world seen through his eyes, but it's impractical; the still snapshots will at least provide a "jerky account". He plans on doubling his current rate of 100 pictures a day.

Erkki Kurenniemi's journey from future-minded visionary working at the interface of science and art, a fresh-faced young man who pioneered computers and robotics and kept one bright eye always on the stars above,  to the haggard and slightly potty sixty-something frantically collating the remains of his days for the benefit of some future race of curators,  strikes me as a perfect parable for our times.

The Ministry of Nostalgia

Owen Hatherley's got a new book out, The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity

It sounds fascinating - as usual

The blurb at Verso: 

Why should we have to “Keep Calm and Carry On”?

In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a “make do and mend” aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition.

The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth.

In coruscating prose—with subjects ranging from Ken Loach’s documentaries, Turner Prize–shortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver’s cooking—Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.

A wide-ranging interview with Owen  by Karen Shook at the Quietus

On Billy Bragg versus ABC: 

"I think songs like ‘Between The Wars’ probably helped put more people off socialist politics in the 1980s than anything… it just painted it as a weird revival society; a sort of constructed folk culture. The covers of his records in this period were actually one of the first instances, I think, of austerity nostalgia.... Look at the cover of Life’s A Riot, based on that Penguin Books grid. No one would have done that in the Seventies or the Sixties; it would have made no sense. It evokes a whole world of working class self-education, comprehensive schools, the London County Council... Probably because I come from quite a Billy Bragg world, I always found ABC’s way of doing things much more subversive. I find authenticity really uninteresting as a cultural thing. At the same time I find lots of those [Bragg] songs quite moving. They’re songs I grew up with. They speak about things I think are very important. My dad had all those records. And Life’s A Riot was great; it’s mostly love songs. There’s something in it that I really distrust, and at the same time it speaks to me very directly. [Me and my Communist parents]’d go down to the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival every year, and it’s like a fucking revivalist society. Everyone tags along, older every year, has their pint from the Workers’ Beer Company and watches Billy Bragg."

On Left nostalgia: 

"I can’t think of any time in which the Left has ever successfully managed to own the past, and made into a successful project. Every time the Left has done well in Britain, whether it was 1945, or 1964 under Harold Wilson, or Tony Blair, it was with modernity. And with an appeal to optimism. Because that’s what socialism is. Lots of stuff in this book comes from reading Patrick Wright’s On Living In An Old Country, which was published in the early 80s. And his target is Tony Benn. Politically he was pretty much on the same side, but there’s a critique of Benn’s mood music. You cannot appeal to a memory of socialism, because we’ve never had it. All you’ll end up appealing to is a memory of failed struggles."

On Corbyn and the Eighties revival / "tribute band" slur

"I think Corbyn is way less retro than the Labour Right. Compared to someone like Jon Cruddas or Tristram Hunt, I think he’s much more forward looking.... The impression I get is that his support mainly comes from people who are over 55 or under 30. People who either remember the welfare state, or have never had anything to do with it whatsoever. All the people in between – the New Labour people sitting on hugely expensive houses in Islington and Edgbaston - that’s the people that don’t get it. So you have this weird alliance of the old-school Labour Left, which had I considered long dead, the Bennites, and these young people for whom I imagine the Durham Miners’ Gala is meaningless. It’ll be difficult for Corbyn, because most of those young people are not yet in a position to be in Parliament. And you can see this factor really majorly with... people who are mostly about my age, who are saying, what the hell is this? They just do not understand it. They see it purely as retro, and I don’t think it is. I think many of Corbyn’s instincts are quite Spirit Of 45, and the Bennism he comes out of was often quite nostalgic. But his support base isn’t."

On hauntology and it being high time to move on:

"Seven or eight years ago, it seemed like a very interesting furrow. The notion that, if you subtract pop from the post-war era, what do you get? And actually lots of the argument of this book is that what you get is – this. It seemed a really interesting thing to do, particularly in the last years of New Labour, the horrible decadence when it felt devoid of the slightest ideas. Ghost Box seemed like a fun way of living your life in a particular kind of bubble. And my life at that point revolved around hanging out in old 50s cafes, going off to look at [Brutalist] buildings like this one before everyone realised that buildings like this one were good."

On the aestheticisation of Brutalism as cult cool fetish missing the point completely - these are places to live

"It was really telling that the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark became a cause celebre, because it was a nadir architecturally. But people were squatting it and trying to save it, saying, we want it to be social housing, leave it alone. Rather than appealing to it on the basis of architecture, it was on the basis of it being useful."