FUTURE TENSE

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER’S 1993 BOOK The Parable of the Sower, which takes the form of a diary written by a Californian teenager named Lauren Oya Olamina, begins on July 20, 2024. Given that it is now October 2024, we are well into the book’s timeline, which uncannily mirrors our own. Olamina introduces us to an America on the brink of total collapse due to systemic problems such as global warming, the wealth gap, and drug addiction, which have led to mass migrations and the return of company towns. Abandoned by the government, walled communities sequester themselves and hoard resources, including water, until violent mobs come for them, too; Olamina teaches herself to survive off the land and dreams of fleeing the wreckage of earth for outer space. Needless to say, the near future imagined in Butler’s novel now reads more like nonfiction than like science fiction. The pit in my stomach grew as I read it again this summer, sharing in the discomforting experience of recognizing in The Parable our own tense present. 

This issue of Artforum is in part an attempt to work through the question of what science fiction, or even the concept of “the future,” might mean to us in this moment. For many months, I have been struggling with the persistent feeling that time is grinding to a halt and that instead of moving forward, everything is going sideways—as if the world is a spinning top that is losing its momentum and beginning to wobble, threatening to send us tumbling into oblivion, or at least the unknown. Against the backdrop of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and climate change, we are now dealing with, among other global calamities, the collective trauma of a live-streamed, never-ending genocide; ontological uncertainty about the definition of humanity brought on by the explosion of AI; epistemological anxiety over our inability to discern truth in the wake of deepfakes; the rise of hard-right politics in Europe; and a US presidential election that (once again) threatens to prematurely end the American experiment. All of these add up to a state of permanent crisis with no climax. Art continues to be a space in which possible futures can be tested and contested, and I am inspired by the artists who imagine both utopia and dystopia for us. And yet, increasingly, I myself feel neither hopeful nor hopeless about “the future”; I simply feel exhausted by it. Even the paradigm itself seems exhausted, as if the last few decades of empty promises from Silicon Valley have finally drained it of all its meaning. Clearly, our collective future is at stake—but what if the first step in fighting for the future is to let it go?

In his 2011 book After the Future, the Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi describes the concept of the future as a twentieth-century trope that has run its course. His 2009 Post-Futurist Manifesto, which parodies the Futurist Manifesto of 1909, ends with the declaration “We will sing to the infinity of the present and abandon the illusion of a future.” In his more recent book Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, he enjoins us to seek the paths to radical change embedded in the here and now. We find a similar focus on the present in The Parable of the Sower. Olamina founds a new religion, Earthseed, based on the idea that the only constant is change, which we must mold through conscious effort; in this view, neither the past nor the future take precedent over the ever-shifting currents of the moment. In the book, her philosophy inspires a growing number of individuals and families to come together and survive by practicing mutual aid. Butler’s parable in turn has been inspiring artists of late, including Garrett Bradley, who is directing the upcoming feature-film adaptation of the book, and who shares in this issue an interview she conducted with one of the real-life adherents of Earthseed, along with photos she took in California while preparing for the film. 

We have paired Bradley’s contribution with Lauren Rosati’s reassessment of an early Soviet avant-garde project by Evgeny Sholpo that foreshadows today’s discourse on AI and an essay by Ruby Thélot that looks at how the future is being reimagined by science-fiction films today. Together, the three contributions span a century of cultural production and approach “the future” as both a historiographic project (through which past futures are excavated) and a political one, insofar as “the future” necessarily determines how we lead our lives today. 

The idea of the future recurs throughout this issue, albeit in more oblique ways. As Pablo Larios suggests in his Spotlight on Tarik Kiswanson, the artist’s sculptures, including his cocoon-like ovoids that appear to levitate, suggest both precarity and the pregnant possibilities that link past and future. Melissa Ragain’s On Site report from a petrochemicals studies conference last spring maps our sense of the future onto a geological time scale, emphasizing the fundamental disjunction between the chronological horizons of our embodied lives and of our sociopolitical imaginations. In contrast, Tracey Emin’s portfolio of unflinching images movingly connects the future to the limits of a lifespan. In its own way, Helen Molesworth and Jason Simon’s interview with Bill Horrigan, the recently retired and visionary curator at Columbus, Ohio’s Wexner Center for the Arts, is also about the future: By looking at how institutions have changed in the past, we might find new ways to think about how they might yet change again. This idea is explored by Mara Hoberman in her Focus review of Mudam Luxembourg’s recent exhibition “A Model,” which was precisely about the future of museums.