Paper short abstract:

Gulf Futurism is one of the newest artistic and literary movements that has left cultural footmarks not only in the Middle East, but on a global stage. This paper undertakes a systematic review of the socio-political and philosophical statements that are transmitted through this movement.

Paper long abstract:

In the last ten years, Gulf futurism has emerged as a trope among artists and writers in the Arabian/Persian Gulf. Their works explore hypercapitalism and consumerism, technology, and outer space ambitions, along with the ethnofutures of a region where migrant workers from the Global South constitute a majority of the population. In contrast to other futurisms (including Afrofuturism), Gulf futurism’s aesthetic and tone are dystopian rather than utopian. It engages with Gulf countries’ sociopolitical problems, especially as they relate to these states’ ambitions for the future, stereotypes about the Gulf, the role of migrant workers, and the gendered dimensions of these issues. Gulf futurism has started to appear increasingly as a literary, artistic, and cinematic trope in which utopian and dystopian imaginaries have been mapped on the deserts and cities of the Gulf states. This paper aims to understand the formation of Gulf Futurism from a critical viewpoint, examining both artists who enthusiastically engage with tropes of Gulf Futurism and artists who critique the movement. Besides pressing concerns such as climate change, scholars have only recently begun attending to the future as a “cultural fact” (Appadurai 2013) or conceptualizing notions of acceleration (Eriksen 2016). Few studies have paid attention to how contemporary art movements engage with the Gulf countries’ sociopolitical problems, especially as they relate to state ambitions for the future. This paper remedies this lack of engagement by undertaking a systematic review of the socio-political and philosophical statements that are transmitted through this movement.

Paper short abstract:

Starting from the artwork of two young female artists from Cuba and Nicaragua interested in ecology, schizophrenia and fable, I reflect on the potential of incorporating disaster, looking to the side rather than forward as strategies to think about futures in repressive contexts.

Paper long abstract:

The fear, the wariness, the waiting, works in response to trauma have been on the Nicaraguan and Cuban art scene for decades. Revolutions in both countries have been bolstered by histories of terror. What do we artist-heirs of this terror do through our work in the face of totalizing discourses? Here I am interested in addressing two works that aim to relocate narrations, feelings, and concepts: Mary y los hombres lagartos (Mary and the Lizard Men) by Cuban artist Camila Lobón and Piedra dulce (Sweet Stone) by Nicaraguan artist Darling López. Two young women artists—both born post-Cold War—determined to respond to the authority of the state are the focus of this proposal. Camila Lobón and Darling López turn to fossilized objects, volcanic lakes, hallucinatory blooming, as useful conceptual departure points to think about futures (Haraway 2016); at the same time, they criticize and learn from the incurable-images produced by the social sciences, national history, and cultural politics (Elhaik 2016). I attempt to discuss the nation—Cuba and Nicaragua—and the totalizing concepts that sustain it through the methodologies proposed by these artworks—speculative fabulation and assemblage—as possibilities to think about the future, looking sideways more than ahead.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses solarpunk, a movement of art, writing, and activism responding to climate crises and impending dystopia by imagining hopeful alternative futures centring sustainability, equity, and an ethics of relation with the more-than-human world, that people can relate to and work towards.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents a discussion of solarpunk as a movement focused on imagining and working towards hopeful futures. The paper is based on my ongoing digital ethnographic fieldwork with solarpunk artists, writers, and activists from around the world, exploring their responses to climate crises and the prevalence of dystopian thinking. Solarpunk is a global distributed movement shaped through and enabled by digital social media technologies through which solarpunks connect to share their perspectives, skills, climate news, tech developments, art and fiction. Solarpunks draw upon this diversity of shared resources, experiences, and cultural knowledges to inform their imaginings of hopeful futures built around the core values of environmental and social justice. Solarpunk art and stories are an example of radical imagining, involving a rethinking the ethics of how we relate to each other, other non-human beings, our economic and institutional frameworks, and the physical environment. The ethics of relation these solarpunk imaginings promote is explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-colonial, drawing upon different Indigenous perspectives that centre kinship and reciprocity with the entire more-than-human web of life we are embedded within. These principles inform how technological and social changes work together to address climate and social issues in solarpunk futures. In this paper, I interrogate how imagining hopeful solarpunk futures is more than escapist fantasy. I argue that solarpunk, whilst global in its constitution, incorporates practical community empowering processes whereby solarpunks work within local communities to collaboratively envision more positive futures for their local areas and the potential paths to implement these futures.

Paper short abstract:

Neuro-art is not a single genre but an art-science scene. Private and public foundations intend to teach the public a new expert truth on the human, thereby pursuing neuroscience's efforts to animate the material brain with phenomena that had been hitherto considered the domain of the soul.

Paper long abstract:

Neuro-art is not a single genre but a broad art-science scene that started to emerge together with the institutions of neuroscience and neurocapitalism. Producing beautiful brain images is a self-confessed pleasure of neuroscientists, who engage with the visual power of neural landscapes in multiple ways (Beaulieu 2002). New operative imaging modes have emerged, which aren't only representations but tools that can guide clinical interventions. Individualized "digital twins" simulations of the human brain have become a new territory for neuroscientific research (see Ritter & al 2021). They blend the "in silico" observation of biological computational models with the "neural" networks of the state of the art computer science, extending the Hollywood-inspired animation of biological science toward real-time interactive modeling (Kelty & Landecker 2004).

The pictorial turn in brain research and its popular brain iconography is being challenged by new immersive art installations and performances based on neurocomputational knowledge. Brandishing the conqueror's banner of science communication and pedagogies, private and public foundations intend to teach the public a new expert truth on the human. They are pursuing neuroscience's efforts of animating the material brains with phenomena that had been hitherto considered the domain of the soul, lurking toward new utopias of the neuronal human (Gorck 2012, 2016). Based on an ongoing multisite ethnographic study in the "brain city Berlin", I will contrast a plurality of perspectives showing the institutional entanglements of several of these distinct yet intersecting endeavors in the domain of contemporary art.