The Time-Complex. Postcontemporary
Time is changing. Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik discuss how the systems and infrastructures of the large-scale societies typical of globalization scramble the conventional order of time, in which the future will succeed a present that has succeeded the past. The post-contemporary present instead transmits a future that has already taken place. This is the time signature of our global condition. It is the time-complex.
The Construction of Unpredictability
Elena Esposito on how the more we try to anticipate the future, the more unknowable it becomes to us. In its classical form, capitalism sacrificed the present to the construction of the future, reinvesting current profits to produce more future incomes. Finance instead uses the future in the present: you are spending the money you are expecting to have in the future today. The present imposes a form that it does not control and cannot predict in the future.
Kathleen Daniel
There’s a Web 1.0 chunkiness and energy to the works of Kathleen Daniel, a.k.a. Kathleen Realness, who makes surreal digital collages, neo-soul music, and video animations. Trippy soul psychedelia, tell-it-like-it-is commentary, haunting vocals, and a shifting cast of humorously grotesque characters come together on her video and music label Duh Real, which features tales of the needy and the greedy, as one work is titled. The 9th Berlin Biennale is presenting an online video retrospective of Daniel’s works. Although whimsical on the surface, her narratives allude to complex political backdrops: recent episodes of violence (especially in a racially divided America), the war in Iraq, Wall Street, inequality, and being a black American woman in Germany.
Puppies Puppies
An anonymous figure at large in an era of hyper-documentation and information, Puppies Puppies mines a rich seam of grotesque humor beneath the clickbait, the brain-shredding, warp speed surface of online life. Annoyingly repetitive internet memes, repurposed pop-culture icons, mundane household goods, lashings of gore, gigabytes of humor and bleak, black kitsch all feature in Puppies Puppies’ worldview. Over the course of the 9th Berlin Biennale, Puppies Puppies disrupts the official Berlin Biennale website with a video each day.