I can kind of see where Accelerationism's coming from - assuming that I
understand Accelerationism correctly, which I more than likely don't.
After you've repeated a certain number of times the usual breast-beating
and groaning about the commodification of personal space and
relationships, the world-domination of monster Web-based corporations,
the failure of monetarist democracy to deliver either equality or
political enfranchisement, the destructiveness of the endless-growth
model of capitalism, the damage it does to our environment, the damage
being done to our minds and our souls as the online/virtual/social
media/gaming/dating app world comes to dominate our attention more and
more thoroughly at the expense of the here-and-now, etc. etc. - after
you've repeated those things a certain number of times, they start to
feel not only tiresome and futile, but inadequate as a response to the
situation in which we find ourselves. You can't keep simply rejecting
and vilifying the new reality which is now our everyday world. You have
to find a way of responding to it, representing it, coming to term with
it, living in it. So perhaps the answer is to embrace it. Instead of
running for the hills, ride the surf. Go with it. Use its energy. Find
ways of making it work for you. As Rob says in his article about
Accelerationist art, the idea is to 'grab the wheel rather than slam on
the brakes'.
The example of Futurism, however, is a deterring one. The
Accelerationists, from what I can gather, are at pains to say that
they're not like the Futurists, but the parallels are difficult to
ignore - here's Wikipedia's take: 'The Futurists admired speed,
technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial
city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over
nature... They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation...
dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against harmony and good
taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and
gloried in science.' And despite their objectionable ideas, the
Futurists produced some strikingly original and challenging work. Their
determination to embrace the new and their contempt for 'established'
art with its traditions, its nostalgia, its sentimentality about nature
and landscape, its distrust of urban environments and technology,
allowed them to wipe the artistic slate (almost) clean and stake a big
claim for themselves in an area into which (almost) nobody had ventured
before. And like the Accelerationists, their agenda was political as
well as artistic. Of course it's difficult to discuss the political
aspects of their ideas now without flinching at their Fascist tendencies
- actually 'tendencies' is putting it mildly - "We will glorify war —
the world's only hygiene — militarism, patriotism, the destructive
gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn
for woman." But the feeling behind this inhumane super-macho posturing
was that just as existing art, existing criticism and existing aesthetic
perspectives were not only inadequate but rotten to the core, based on
falsehoods, and needing to be junked before anything of real value could
be constructed, so too with society and its values - everything would
have to be smashed to pieces and scoured clean by technology, war, or
better still techno-war, and only then could proper foundations be put
in place and a proper society be constructed.
The problem is, of course, that when society actually reaches the
melting-point, what follows is not a rebirth, a clean slate, a chance to
start all over again, but terrible human suffering on a massive scale,
followed by a slow and painful, often tyrannical, process of
reconstruction. The meltdown-and-rebirth process has been envisioned
before: here is the poet Robert Graves writing in the 1961 edition of
The White Goddess: 'No: there seems no escape from our difficulties
until the industrial system breaks down for some reason or other, as it
nearly did in Europe during the Second World War, and nature reasserts
herself with grass and trees among the ruins.' But the reality, as we
ought to be able to see with the benefit of fifty years of hindsight, is
more likely to look like post-revolutionary Russia or China than some
kind of return to primal innocence, assuming that there ever was such a
thing as primal innocence.
Of course, the Accelerationists would probably argue that the
let's-crank-everything-up-until-it-breaks philosophy, or the
let's-step-on-the-gas-until-we-achieve-escape-velocity philosophy, are
only minor strands of what they've got to say, and perhaps only
expressed by a few nutcases on the fringe of the movement. Just as
important is the attempt to create some kind of new hacktivist politics
that gets beyond the 'folk politics' of the Occupy movement. Just
sitting down and protesting isn't enough: that's been demonstrated.
Sure, you get on the news, but getting on the news isn't enough either.
Everybody forgets you after a few days. Enthusiasm wanes. People have
got their ordinary lives to get on with. The protest either fizzles out,
or it's kept going by a few diehard cranks, and it becomes part of the
landscape, so familiar that its meaning gets rubbed away. What did the
occupation at St Pauls achieve? What did the Greenham Common protests
achieve? In order to actually change things, you have to find a way of
getting inside the machinery and turning it against itself.
Well, maybe - but what kind of things are we talking about? The two that
come most readily to mind are BitCoin and 3D printing. Both of these, it
seems, get inside the system and change the rules, and they both have
enormous potential to remodel the socio-economic landscape, but whether
the net effects will be beneficial or detrimental remains to be seen. Is
BitCoin going to render the money-markets obsolete and put banks out of
business, and if so is the BitCoin model more democratic or less
democratic than the existing one? Is 3D printing going to allow
technological advances to spread rapidly and inexpensively to the poorer
parts of the world, or is it just going to put millions of blue-collar
workers out of a job, or both?
I've probably got all this quite wrong. I wouldn't be at all surprised
if someone who actually knows something about Accelerationism, such as
Rob, were to tell me that actually my description of it is a long way
wide of the mark. But let's go back to Accelerationist aesthetics for a
moment. What makes a work Accelerationist, and what would exclude it?
What about Annie Abrahams' recent video, 'Besides, compressed by
communication' (https://vimeo.com/160074657)? A screen is split into
two, and in the two sides of the screen different objects are placed at
different times, creating a kind of visual dialogue. Simultaneously, two
female voices are having a discussion, usually about the effects of
digital communication and social media on our society and consciousness.
Is this an Accelerationist piece? It certainly addresses the subject of
digital acceleration and the effect it's having on our lives. But I
would suggest that it isn't Accelerationist, because it talks about
these effects rather than embodying them, its meanings aren't confined
to that subject, and it wasn't constructed by repurposing bits of
digital technology.
What about Ruth's work 'Time Is Speeding Up'
(http://gtp.ruthcatlow.net/) from the 'We are Not Alone' show? The title
itself suggests that it might be Accelerationist - acceleration is its
theme. And again, part of the meaning of the piece is to do with digital
communication and social media. Visitors to the gallery are invited to
stand in front of the camera and have their pictures taken, thus
becoming part of the piece, but as the Geological Time Piece - the
programme at the heart of the installation - compresses more and more
images of the installation into the same display-time as the show
progresses, so each selfie becomes more and more compressed until all of
the participants are reduced to flickers, a comment on the way that the
digital continuum sucks in our individual voices and merges them into a
torrent of anonymity. But although it comments on digital culture, uses
a specially-commissioned bit of programming, and links to its own
Twitter account, 'Time is Speeding Up' is at least as much about the
human feeling that time is going by faster and faster as we get older as
it is about digital culture - and that's a feeling, of course, which has
been with us since pre-digital days. It also uses the non-digital as
well as the digital elements - for example the sunlight on the gallery
wall plays an extremely important part. So I would say that it isn't
thoroughly Accelerationist, because it isn't built entirely from new
technology and it isn't thoroughly focussed on new technology in terms
of its subject matter.
Looking at the examples of Accelerationist art in Rob's article, you get
a slightly different feel. 'The Promise of Total Automation', for
example - the title sounds a bit like a manifesto, a bit like barmy
science-fiction. I only know the piece from the photograph in the
article, but it looks tongue-in-cheek and witty, especially the two
machines/consoles on the right hand side, one of them looking heroically
optimistic, throwing out its chest, with its nose or control stick
jutting up into the air, while the other, with a drooping-down nose,
looks glumly at its own feet. The 'Xenofeminism gif', just below in the
article, has got a similar vibe to it. A woman who looks partly like a
science-fiction robot, partly like something out of Japanese Manga,
partly like Mickey Mouse, partly like a cyborg insect, with her arms
flung out and her breasts radiating circles of power - retro and
futuristic both at the same time, over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek, but
also using new technology, in the shape of the gif.
Is this Accelerationist art? Using digital technology to comment on
itself, and to play with ideas about how we envision the future? If so,
it's difficult to object to it, but there may be certain inbuilt
limitations in terms of its tone and subject matter. Is it possible to
create Accelerationist art which directs our attention to the non-human
world - geological timescales and the perspective they offer on our own
lives - sunlight and the way it moves across a wall - in the same way
that Ruth's 'Time is Speeding Up' does? And is it possible to create
Accelerationist art that has the same still, contemplative, mindful
quality as Annie's 'Besides, compressed by communication' - a piece
which seems to slow time down and intensify our awareness of the
here-and-now, of insignificant particular things like ashtrays and
plastic bags, and of aesthetic considerations like the way two objects
placed alongside each other can create both a balance and a dissonance -
is it possible for Accelerationist art to do this, rather than speeding
time up and overwhelming us with heroic and vertiginous ideas about the
future?
One last remark. I'd been trying to write something on this subject for
three days, but every time I paused for breath I found that a new crop
of posts had sprouted up on NetBehaviour, either people saying some of
the things I had been intending to say, or people saying things I
hadn't thought of and making me rethink my own ideas. Not to mention the
extra comments a bits of artwork that are popping up on Neterarti. It's
impossible to keep up, but it's also profoundly inspiring and exciting.
Which may mean, I think, that this project/debate itself is an example
of Accelerationism - it's commenting on digital culture, it's using
digital media as its means of expression, it exemplifies the information
overload which is now part of our everyday lives, but at the same time
it attempts to rebuild that information overload into a new form, to
make something positive out of it.
- Edward
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