Last year, Daphne Dragona and I spent the summer processing the amazing archive of projects and text that Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana put together in 13+ years, under the label PostScriptUM. The PostScriptUM Anthology (2010–2023). Essays on Art, Technology, Society and the Environment is the result of this effort of re-reading, selection and contextualization of a body of texts that followed the present, and that now document the past.
Beautifully designed by Federico Antonini, the book features a list of contributors that speak by itself: Aude Launay, Bojana Kunst, Clémence Seurat, Daniela Silvestrin, Dušan Kažić, Eva & Franco Mattes, Felix Stalder, Florian Cramer, Geoff Cox, Ida Hiršenfelder, Inke Arns, James Bridle, Jaya Klara Brekke, Jon Lackman, Lev Kreft, Marc Garrett, Martin Zeilinger, Matthew Fuller, Mojca Kumerdej, monochrom, Nika Mahnič, Paolo Ruffino, Primož Krašovec, Régine Debatty, RYBN, Silvio Lorusso, Steve Rushton, Tomislav Medak, Trevor Paglen, Valentina Tanni, Vuk Ćosić.
Here you can order the book or download a sneak preview. After the break, you can read a short postilla I wrote to fill up the final pages. I called it The Lot’s Wife Syndrome.
As an art historian by training, I have a strong, deep-rooted, perhaps excessive respect for the past. I love to look back. I naturally tend to think that the present has incurred a debt to the past which it can only repay through observation; but I also know that this act of observation robs the past of its autonomy, because it is in the present that it takes place. The past does not exist except as memory and as a narrative that I infer from the objects and texts that are present to me in the here and now.
Having observed, over the past quarter century, those who dealt – as artists or theoreticians – with the relationship between technology, culture and society, I could not help but notice a certain resistance to this looking back. I like to call it the Lot’s wife syndrome: it is as if the past has built itself, like Sodom, around a mistaken relationship, and to go back and look at it, re-actualise it, subjects us to the risk of turning ourselves, like Lot’s wife, into a statue of salt. This is not really amnesia: technology’s past is being recovered again and again, as media archaeology, as historical narrative, as the construction of a canon. And yet, the rapid changes in our relationship with technology induce us to regard the earlier forms of this relationship, and their artistic and cultural manifestations, as obsolete, naïve, wrong, inconvenient, embarrassing, out of place in the present time.
In other words, what seems wrong to us, irretrievable, is not the technology of the past, but the form taken by our relationship with it: where we position ourselves on the “political compass” of the human-technology relationship, between the intersecting directions of love and hate, of rejecting “technological progress” or adopting it unconditionally. It is naïve to celebrate the internet as a space of freedom, now that it has become a panopticon with no escape route; it is childish and immoral to play with its potential for identity simulation and mythopoetic construction, now that economic and political powers are generating avalanches of fake news; and what about open culture and the cultural revolution of open source, now that new machines of exploitation and surveillance are being built on these very technologies?
So it happens that the redemption of a position, a view, a work takes place with a regularity unmatched in other areas of culture, through the attribution of the status of “pioneer”. The past has no value in itself, but only as a prelude to the present or a foretaste of the future. Pioneer of generative art, pioneer of VR, pioneer of artificial intelligence: if you do not anticipate the future, if you belong to your time only, if you are just history, you are neglected. What we forget in this looking at the past merely as anticipation is that humans and technology are two co-evolving organisms: more than anything else – more than technological hypes, flows of venture capitals, laws and international agreements – it is the past forms of that relationship that shape their evolution in the present and future. Or to put it provocatively in the outdated jargon of cyberneticians: the culture that manifests itself from the encounter and friction between humans and technology plays a key role in maintaining the homeostatic balance of the new organism that arises from this encounter.
What I tried to do with Daphne Dragona, sifting through Aksioma’s exhibition and publishing activity, was to compile an anthology of relationships. In the book you’re holding in your hands, you’ll find 28 texts, but the positions expressed therein are many more, since the existence of each text was triggered by an exhibition or discursive event that has left a more or less explicit mark on it. We invite you to treasure them, not as sterile archives of the past, not as pioneering anticipations of the present, but as traces of an unfinished process that both determines the present and offers clues to subvert and transform it, again and again.