Dystopian and Utopian Impulses in Art Making: The World We Want

By Grace McQuilten and Daniel Palmer

Contemporary art has a complex relationship to crisis. On the one hand, art can draw us toward apocalypse: it charts unfolding chaos, reflects and amplifies the effects of crisis, shows us the dystopian in both our daily life and in our imagined futures. On the other hand, art’s complexity helps fathom the uncertainty of the world, question and challenge the order of things, and allows us to imagine new ways of living and being – to make new worlds.

This collection of written and visual essays includes artistic responses to various crises – including the climate emergency, global and local inequalities and the COVID-19 pandemic – and suggests new forms of collectivity and collaboration within artistic practice. It surveys a wide variety of practices, oriented from the perspective of Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Art making has always responded to the world; the essays in this collection explore how artists are adapting to a world in crisis.

The contributions to this book are arranged in four sections: artistic responses; critical reflections, new curatorial approaches and the art school reimagined. Alongside the written chapters, three photographic essays provide specific examples of new visual forms in artistic practice under crisis conditions.

The primary market for the book will be scholars and upper-level students of art and curating at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Specifically, the book will appeal to the burgeoning field of study around socially engaged art.

Beyond the academic and student market, it will appeal to practicing artists and curators, especially those engaged in social practice and community-based art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781789386547

Book preview

Introduction:

Contemporary Art and Crisis

Grace McQuilten and Daniel Palmer

Contemporary art has a complex relationship to crisis. On the one hand, art can draw us toward apocalypse: it charts unfolding chaos, reflects and amplifies the effects of crisis, shows us the dystopian in both our daily life and in our imagined futures. On the other hand, art’s complexity helps fathom the uncertainty of the world, question and challenge the order of things, and allows us to imagine new ways of living and being – to make new worlds. In El món que necessitem/The world we need, Donna Haraway and Marta Segarra (2019) challenge us to dramatically shift how we understand our relationship to the planet in light of ecological and social crises, and to imagine the world we need. Dystopian and Utopian Impulses in Art Making: The World We Want responds to this call and takes it a step further – inviting artists to imagine the world we want. The collection of written and visual essays includes artistic responses to various crises – including the climate emergency, global and local inequalities and the COVID-19 pandemic – and suggests new forms of collectivity and collaboration within artistic practice. It surveys a wide variety of practices, oriented from the perspective of Australia, New Zealand and Asia, and offers tentative proposals for practicing differently.

The idea for this collection emerged early in the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Already, the devastating and long-term impacts of the virus on lives and communities around the world were becoming clear. But equally, amidst the health crisis, it was also clear that artists were responding in characteristically creative ways. The year 2020 – which unfolded like a dystopian science fiction novel and saw the 2011 film Contagion return to the streaming charts – may yet be understood as a turning point for how humans inhabit the world. Art making may never be quite the same. In the context of the climate emergency, the catastrophe of the Trump administration and the energy of the Black Lives Matter movement, a sense of urgency had already been growing among activist artists for years. But the extraordinary crisis of COVID-19 during 2020 and 2021, with lasting effects in 2022, has forced upon all artists and art workers a fundamental reckoning about art’s value and its potential contribution. As much of the artworld turned to social media for its community in the so-called ‘new normal’ – and the market warmed to digital art via cryptocurrency – others recognized that anything approaching normal would never be enough. Rather than a desire to return to how things were before COVID-19 lockdowns, what was needed, more urgently than ever, were proposals for how the world might be different.

If COVID-19 provided a new context for art making, a further motivation for producing this book lay in our understanding of what is happening to art schools around the world, and in particular in Australia and the United Kingdom. As editors based in Australia, we are proud to be part of a research group at RMIT University called Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (CAST). CAST supports creative practice that critically engages with social and public spheres – with a particular interest in how artistic practices intersect with issues of equity, access and democracy. But the broader context is alarming. The university sector in Australia has faced a sustained attack by the federal government, with the humanities and the arts targeted with massive student fee increases. With echoes of a similar assault in Britain, the arts are understood by populist right-wing governments as irrelevant to their commercial imperatives and voting base (university education has now become the biggest indicator of voting behaviour). Taking advantage of a sector wounded by the loss of international (full fee-paying) students, the attack has been disguised by rhetorical support for ‘job readiness’ and ‘employability’ for Australian students. The result is an ideological rejection of the modern idea of the university as a site of creative and critical learning. In this context, the place of art schools within universities has become increasingly precarious.

To propose new futures necessarily involves deep reflection on the present. The picture that emerges is obviously grim – from environmental collapse and our collective failure to address the global threat of climate change, to growing economic and social inequalities and the ongoing injustices of colonialism, racism and patriarchy – underpinned by new forms of economic exploitation, social exclusion and border policing promoted by the international rise of right-wing populism. Despite the the ongoing inability of democratic institutions to respond meaningfully to such crises, more and more people recognize that something must be done to reverse the dangerous trends of the past several decades. That despair is not an option has become a truism, a slogan for climate activists the world over and closely associated with leftist politicians (notably, in the wake of Trump, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). And yet, to conceive of how things could be different it remains necessary to grapple with the dystopian dimension of the present. Indeed, as several of the writers in this volume argue, many people are already living in a dystopia – Indigenous Australians, for example. Claire G. Coleman (2017) reminds us that COVID-19 is not the first apocalyptic disease to threaten Australia – Aboriginal people suffered the introduction of European diseases when the country was first invaded. Likewise, rising sea levels are already producing dystopic conditions in low-lying Pacific nations. And even before pandemic-induced lockdowns, what would once have seemed darkly dystopian seems to have become commonplace in the field of networked machine learning. As media theorist Mark Andrejevic points out, health insurance companies can modify the cost of your premiums based on photos you display on Instagram and during the COVID-19 global health crisis, private companies even sought to profit by undermining vaccination efforts through viral messaging online (Andrejevic 2020: 155).

Exposing and bearing witness to the world’s horror is something artists have always been good at, and Hollywood loves to dramatize through exaggerated worst-case scenarios. The dystopian imagination relishes in depicting societies that have veered into totalitarianism, enforced systemic surveillance and mass manipulation, and given free rein to oppressive technologies at the expense of human rights and the natural world. Such dystopian images and stories can highlight the potential drift of the present world, and challenge our capacity to accept it, to be outraged or to revolt. Dystopias in art can serve to make useful criticisms about current trends or a political system. But the danger is that we simply end up with sublime imagery of disaster and stasis, passively accepting the world the way it is. As Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert (2017: 269) argue, artistic dystopias can act as early warnings but tend to express a conservative impulse – which can be useful in the case of environmental art, but not for showing us a vision of a better world. As they note, ‘It is not that people do not know that something is wrong, it is that alternatives are so difficult to imagine’ (2017: 257). Mark Fisher puts it even more bluntly: ‘In the reign of ‘capitalist realism’, he suggests, ‘it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ (Fisher 2009: 2). However, the apocalyptic mindset thrives on cynicism and conspiracy theories. The question, as Donna Haraway (2016: 35) puts it with characteristic attention to our situated condition, is ‘How can we think in times of urgencies without the self-indulgent and self-fulfilling myths of apocalypse, when every fiber of our being is interlaced, even complicit, in the webs of processes that must somehow be engaged and repatterned?’

Both the dystopian and utopian impulse is engaged in a negation of the existing state of things. Art making, the will to create, is already a recognition that the present is lacking. Artists, who famously suffer rates of depression higher than the rest of the community, long for a different and usually ‘better’ world. Such an impulse – ‘the desire for a different, better way of being’ (Magagnoli 2015: 12) – finds a philosophical tradition in twentieth-century utopian studies that originated in the work of Ernst Bloch and was further elaborated in the writings of Fredric Jameson. All are inspired by Thomas More’s 1516 fantasy voyage, Utopia, that gave the concept a name and inspired centuries of social reformers. As Duncombe and Lambert point out, More’s Utopia appears contradictory because the Greek origins of his made-up word, ou and topos, famously translate to ‘no place’. The point, they argue, is that utopia ‘is not a place, it is a tool for imagining’ (2017: 260). Yet after the failed political experiments in utopias of the twentieth century, the term utopia has long been banished from political theory, framed as an impossible – and possibly dangerous – political ideal, a flawed social blueprint, or a thought experiment without any practical import. And culturally, for the critical postmodernists of the 1980s and 1990s, the utopian imagination appeared fatally associated with the problems of Western modernism – with all its racist and sexist dimensions. To be sure, utopian thought is not necessarily progressive, and the question ‘better for whom?’ must always be asked. Yet even the most compensatory or nostalgic of utopian fantasies retains a critical function in relation to the present, as Bloch argued in The Principle of Hope (1954). The concept of utopia, as Paolo Magagnoli has argued, is ‘fraught with contradictions and ambiguities’ since ‘utopian thought and visions are an inevitable first step and prerequisite for any transformative, emancipatory political project’ (2015: 13). Indeed, the imagination of difference is essential to produce political and social change, as Jameson spelt out. ‘It is difficult’, he argued ‘to imagine any radical political programme today without the conception of systemic otherness, of an alternate society, which only the idea of utopia seems to keep alive, however feebly’ (Jameson 2004: 36).

To salvage the generative possibilities of utopia from its totalizing tendencies, some thinkers and writers have also conceptualized micro-utopias, sites that enable spaces of becoming, transformation and hope, and that do so without universal claims. Michel Foucault (1986) responded to the ‘unreal’ nature of utopia with the idea of heterotopias, real sites that enact utopian ideals but through multiplicity, a celebration of difference and with the possibility of contestation. For French curator Nicolas Bourriaud, artists in the 1990s shifted from a utopian agenda to provisional solutions in the here and now; he called these situations ‘micro-utopias’, a kind of ethical way of inhabiting the world in a better way. As he wrote in Relational Aesthetics, ‘the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist’ (2002: 13). However, Bourriaud’s ‘hands-on utopias’ (2002: 9) seemed to relinquish efforts towards more ambitious and lasting social change. Davina Cooper (2014) brings these ideas together with her ‘everyday utopias’, sites of political and social activity that combine the qualities of imagination and action, offering the potential to re-invigorate radical politics. Art, as a speculative re-imagining of the world grounded in practice, working with both material form and social organization, remains a crucial site for these more pragmatic, real or ‘lived’ approaches to utopian thinking. For Duncombe and Lambert the utopian horizon is essential for artists seeking social change: ‘We believe that the job of artistic activists is to examine the present with a critical eye, but also to imagine and create a new world, and help others do the same. To conjure up Utopia or utopias’ (2017: 258).

Of course, conjuring utopias is no small task in the face of so many global crises. And yet it is perhaps necessary now to suggest that it is part of ‘art’s job’, as Justin O'Conner (2020) puts it, ‘along with the other natural, social and human sciences’ to ‘help articulate how we might inhabit the world in a manner that might promote human thriving not its extermination.’ In short, we need art that shows how other worlds are possible, worlds borne out of a confrontation with the existing world and all its interconnected crises.

The contributors to this volume present a series of artistic, curatorial considerations and pedagogical proposals for the world we live in now, and the world we want. The ‘we’ in our subtitle is deliberatively provocative, suggesting a collective that is necessarily always becoming. The collective is presented as an aspirational horizon rather than a given. Likewise, the authors do not propose a uniform view, and as editors we do not want to suggest a false coherence between their diverse perspectives. However, we have arranged the chapters according to four sections that unpack broader questions and considerations: (1) artistic responses; (2) critical reflections; (3) new curatorial approaches; and (4) the art school reimagined. In addition, alongside the written chapters, three photographic essays provide specific examples of new visual forms in artistic practice under crisis conditions.

The first part, Artistic Responses, includes the voices and perspectives of artists whose work responds to specific forms of crisis, including ongoing colonial forces, COVID-19, ecological crisis, the precarity of contemporary democracy and the rise of ‘fake news’, and community experiences of racism and marginalization. The perspectives of Australian Indigenous artists lead this section, including Claire G. Coleman and Robert Walton’s reflections on what an ‘indigenised future’ could look like, developed in relation to a collaborative public art project, and Vicki Couzens’ exploration of a long-term, community engaged cultural project on revitalizing traditional knowledges in relation to the use of possum skins, which has developed into large scale public artworks and practical, community development work. This section then turns to specific artistic practices and projects, including Cherine Fahd’s intimate portraiture, reimagined in a world of social distancing; Philip Samartzis’ sound recordings from marginal environments on the edge of ecological collapse; Sera Waters’ collective craftivism in the form of ‘Survivalist samplers’ that provides social connection and tools for survival via material practice; reflections on ‘fake news’ through contemporary print practices by the News Network Project; and CoHealth’s ‘arts generator’ approach to developing collaborative, socially engaged art projects with communities experiencing systemic forms of racism and marginalization.

Building on these insights from artists and practitioners, Part 2, Critical Reflections, looks more broadly at how artistic practices are intersecting with different forms of contemporary crisis. This includes Madeleine Clark’s examination of how several contemporary artists are responding to domestic violence crises; Zara Stanhope’s analysis of an artist-led community-building project responding to the global refugee crisis; Nancy Mauro-Flude and Kate Rich’s experimentation with new and radical forms of economic organization in the arts; Keely Macarow’s utopian imagining of how artists can reshape the world post-COVID-19; and Su Ballard’s poetic reflections on artworks that bring utopian framings to the challenges of climate change. Ballard’s speculative and evocative text about art writing in the context of the Anthropocene asks: ‘What might an art history of the world we want look like?’

These critical reflections lead to Part 3, New Curatorial Approaches, which presents curatorial perspectives that bring the ideas of ethics and care, in different forms, to contemporary forms of crisis. Tara McDowell offers a call-to-arms for a curatorial ethics in the context of both climate change and a global rise in authoritarianism, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s idea of amor mundi, or love for the world. McDowell also questions the bias in contemporary utopian thought towards a utopia of scarcity and poverty, or what Jameson called ‘a Franciscan utopia’ (2004: 49). Marnie Badham and Frances Maravillas advance the idea of ‘gentle activism’ in relation to their collaborative curatorial project ‘Bruised Food’; Kelly Chan explores collective curatorial tactics and peaceful activism in relation to ongoing protests in Hong Kong; and Jacina Leong reflects on the ethics of care in contemporary curatorial practices.

The final part of the book, Part 4: The Art School Reimagined, considers the nature of art production through the lens of the art school, reimagining its potential in light of multiple social, economic and ecological crises. Fiona Lee considers artistic projects that disrupt the managerialism of contemporary art schools in favour of what she terms ‘rogue elements’, advancing radical forms of pedagogy and practice; while Kelly Hussey-Smith advocates for models of community praxis in art education that prioritize values of collectivity, ethics and civics in the curriculum.

In addition, interspersed among the chapters, we include a set of suggestive visual essays by three Australian artists: Heather Hesterman, Clare McCracken and Ben Sheppard. Hesterman’s Inland Sea (2020) documents an environmental performance work, bringing Sturt’s desert peas to a parched landscape, revisiting colonial explorer Charles Sturt 1840s voyage in search of an inland sea in the centre of Australia. Similarly, with Planthropocene, Hesterman ruptures the barren outer suburbs with a mobile forest in a mirrored box. McCracken’s visual story I Was There but Now I'm Here reflects on a sense of isolation brought about by COVID-19; the artist revisited her favourite public spaces around the world with the help of Google Street View, then captured a screenshot which she then stitched into a pocket-sized tapestry to be carried around the empty streets of Melbourne. Finally, Sheppard’s chaotic drawings, made with common biros on paper, make a connection between the unfolding temporality of doodling and identity as a work in progress. For Sheppard, doodling presents an alternative visual and conceptual space.

‘Utopias’, as Jameson once wrote, ‘come to us as barely audible messages from a future that may never come into being’ (2004: 54). By bringing together the perspectives of artists, curators, writers, thinkers and educators in contemporary art practice, this book privileges practice-based responses to the crises of our times, and in so doing, draws out the tensions and complexities of how artists engage with the social, economic, geographic and political environments – at times dystopian in providing critical insight into these overlapping crises and at others utopian in hope and ambition – all linked by the conviction that another, better world must be imagined in order to be realized.

REFERENCES

Andrejevic, Mark (2020), Automated Media, New York: Routledge.

Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002), Relational Aesthetics, Les Presses du Réel.

Coleman, Claire G. (2017), ‘Apocalypses are more than the stuff of fiction – First Nations Australians survived one’, ABC Radio National, 8 December, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-08/first-nations-australians-survived-an-apocalypse-says-author/9224026. Accessed 24 May 2021.

Cooper, Davina (2013), Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces, Durham: Duke University Press.

Duncombe, Stephen and Lambert, Steve (2017), ‘Lessons from Utopia’, Visual Inquiry: Learning & Teaching Art, 6:2, pp. 253–72.

Fisher, Mark (2009), Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, London: Zero Books.

Foucault, Michel (1986), ‘Of other spaces: Utopias and heterotopias’ (trans. J. Miskowiec), Diacritics, 16:1, pp. 22–27.

Haraway, Donna (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham: Duke University Press.

Haraway, Donna and Segarra, Marta (2019), El món que necessitem/The World We Need, Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

Jameson, Frederic (2004), ‘The politics of utopia’, New Left Review, 25, pp. 35–54.

Magagnoli, Paolo (2015), Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Documentary, New York: Columbia University Press.

O'Conner, Justin (2020), ‘Art and culture after COVID-19’, Wake in Fright, 9 April, https://wakeinalarm.blog/2020/04/09/art-and-culture-after-covid-19. Accessed 15 June 2020.

PART 1

ARTISTIC RESPONSES

1

Beyond the Dystopia-in-Progress: Rehearsing an Indigenized Future ‘Australia’ Through Public Art

Robert E.Walton and Claire G. Coleman

The distance between

what is

and what will be

is less than you think

It is no distance at all

There is no linear past present and future

Only the now

with all possibilities

enfolded by

and unfolding from

what is

A just world

is not unreachable

It is what’s next

You can breathe it

in your next breath

Feel it

in your next heartbeat

Think it

in your next thought

(Ambelin Kwaymullina, Message from the Ngurra Palya [2020: 247])

Imagining an Indigenized Australia, a postcolonial Australia, is an almost insurmountable challenge but one that many Indigenous mob and other people from colonized diasporas have taken on. As impossible as decolonization appears, it is essential because without this approach, Australia can never become the ‘lucky country’ some already imagine it to be.

A utopia, if it ever can exist, belongs in the future. We await a message from that future speaking to us on how the world will change so we can take the path prepared for us. That is the important speculation, the work of speculative fiction, to see the future and from that future to examine the now. We send messages back and forth through time, using what anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, in his 1953 essay ‘The Dreaming’, called ‘everywhen’, the Aboriginal Australian concept of time in which the abstract concepts of past, present and future do not exist (2009: 53). It is from this position that poet Ambelin Kwaymullina imagines the travellers on the Ngurra Palya, ‘a ship that traverses all of spacetime’ sending a message to 2020 from 2050 to remind us that ‘there is no linear past present and future’. In this sense, the future is a utopia, it does not exist.

Present day Australia is a dystopia. Ask an Aboriginal person – survivors of slavery, massacres, theft of land, the stolen generation, destruction of sacred sites, the Northern Territory Intervention and now the imposition of cashless welfare cards. Ask a refugee interred indefinitely. Ask a victim of the co-called robodebt scheme, ‘one of the biggest and most expensive policy fiascos of a generation’ (Henriques-Gomes 2020: n.pag.), hounded by debt collectors, forced from home. Ask anyone with a disability. Ask the incarcerated. Ask the Country above and around you, holding you up, gripping the soles of your feet. Ask an endangered species (a northern quoll, an Arts student, a coal miner). Ask the burning bush. Ask the bleaching coral.

Ask Behrouz Boochani, an asylum seeker who was detained indefinitely by Australia but granted refugee status in New Zealand and who in the New York Times wrote,

Australia presents a beautiful and attractive image of itself to the world but the modern history of Australia is full of puzzles. The more you investigate the more absorbed you become in its history. My journey educated me in its hidden, darker history of prejudice and xenophobia. It is a history written in places like Manus Island and Nauru, and has its roots in its settler colonial origins.

(Boochani 2020: n.pag.)

If you believe yourself to be living in a utopia, the lucky country perhaps, congratulations, your imagination is enviable, but we hate to break the news, you are not paying attention. If you can say ‘well it’s not that bad’, if you are ignoring the racism, the gaslighting and all the other dystopian rhinestones glued to Australia’s paper crown, then you have purchased utopia with self-delusion and have invested with complicity.

You are in good company. We are part of the problem too. We have been trying not to be and have now joined forces to try some new tactics. When asked who should read her first novel, one of us answered:

The average Australian, who doesn't necessarily understand the Aboriginal perspective on the invasion – or the colonisation as they would call it. People who don't understand why we're upset about it. The people who chuck a tizzy when we say we should change the date [of Australia Day]. The entire purpose of writing Terra Nullius was to provoke empathy in people who had none.

(Sullivan 2017: n.pag.)

The other one was caught ‘fostering what he calls radical empathy, in our society where it’s easier for hearts to close and for hope to be lost than for our childlike openness and wonder to remain at the centre of life’ (Coleman 2018: n.pag., quoting Walton). Together we are envisioning and making a new project that seems almost impossible, a dream we are co-authoring, an escape route out of the dystopia-in-progress. We are in process, the project is forever forming, the dream is utopia, the difficulty is delivering it into being, the nightmare is marring its perfect potential. Be quiet with us, listening. We wish to hear the Message from the Ngurra Palya. We need you to travel into the future and send the message back to yourself. We can figure out how together.

Child of Now

In this chapter, we write from the collaborative creative process of our interdisciplinary public artwork Child of Now (2018–present), a project that locates the present day Naarm (Melbourne) as a dystopia-in-progress that can be reformed through imagination and action. Our project speculates on radical variations of how the next century might turn out. It focuses collective attention by enacting rehearsals of possible futures. Our aim is to foster embodied experiences of indigenized, equitable and sustainable societies, to explore how the future might feel. The artwork does this by combining narrative and portraiture to imagine the life course of a child born today. We invite 14,400 people to be the Child of Now at key moments in the future to help make decisions. The sum of all the decisions creates a collaboratively authored future history of the next century. The holograms we create of each person’s performance as the Child of Now form an animated portrait that ages sequentially, one body at a time, one minute each, through a whole life course. Then, 14,400 minutes (ten days) later, the Child of Now will die, approximately one hundred years in the future.

It’s a lot to take in. We know because we are dreaming Child of Now into being one description, one talk, one coffee, one chapter and one convert at a time. We will introduce our impetus, what we are attempting, the risks involved in the project, including the folly of discussing it before it is realized, and the technologies we are developing to enable it. One of our aims is to be able to share this chapter with our future collaborators so they can get up to speed quickly. By continuing to read, you are becoming one of them, one of us. We will introduce the archive of the future, created by the 14,400 future collaborators, containing the embodied performance of the Child of Now in every day of the next century, and the stories of what was seen, heard, felt and done in each day. We have a long and troubled history with archives and the collection of biometric data (biodata), so will discuss this in some depth. We take inspiration from contemporary Indigenous artists’ response to settler-colonial archival practices, and their repurposing subversions of the gruesome collections of people gathered, objectified and sorted into human or not.

Child of Now is an exercise in co-authorship, that begins with the two of us, Claire and Robert, and will grow and unfold to include thousands more. Our utopian aim is to preserve the idiosyncrasy of each voice, gesture, turn of phrase, body, skin tone, language and perspective of every contributor in the Child of Now’s future archive. This portrait of the Child of Now comprised of thousands of people and their observations of the future will be radically plural, it will not be homogenized as written language is wont to do, like this chapter, where you can no longer tell where Claire ends and Robert begins. Specific plurality is important. We teem with voices, not a single voice and we should disentangle ours for a moment.

Claire: I am a 46-year-old queer Noongar woman, born in Perth about 500 kilometres (as the Wardong flies) from where the bones of my ancestors lay in the south coast of the place now called Western Australia. I have lived and worked in and around Naarm (Melbourne) as a guest on the stolen land of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurung people since 1996. My writing is focussed on the endless work of decolonizing the continent now called Australia.

Robert: I am a 40-year-old queer immigrant to Australia from the United Kingdom, born in England but of Welsh, Scottish and Manx ancestry living and working in Naarm, the unceded land of the Boonwurung and Wurundjeri people of the Eastern Kulin Nation since 2011. I am a guest here and only beginning to unravel the white and colonial privilege I inherited as an adult in Australia. I have much to learn.

We both deal in imagined futures. Claire through the creative spasm of speculative fiction, Robert through the creation of speculative performances. Both require acts of faith, rituals, improvisation, rehearsal and the articulation of another’s attention. Neither happens by accident, though accidents are involved and often encouraged. Neither knows the end point at the beginning of the journey. When we started on Child of Now, our first collaboration together, Claire said ‘the near impossibility appeals to me’ (Coleman 2018: n.pag.). Endeavours such as ours come complete with risks.

We need to choose how best to spend the precious time we have. The risk, as ever, is that Child of Now will not compound the valuable time each collaborator invests in it. Speculation on a pluralistic and expansive project like Child of Now that is near impossible and dangerously time-hungry is itself a risk for creators.

In planning to create our speculative future archive we risk reiterating the colonial approaches that we seek to undo: ‘collecting’, dehumanizing and transforming people into biodata trophies of empire and intellectual property. Despite our best intentions, how do we resist such pitfalls? Is everything we make soiled by the deadening Midas touch of settler-colonial hands? We aspire to create a representative and inclusive portrait of, with and through our future collaborators but wonder who will be excluded from participation despite our best intentions.

We find ourselves in the position of creating frameworks for participation that enable co-authorship, where we (and especially Robert) can be decentred to become just two of the 14,400 voices authoring the project. Radical plurality is a utopian ideal.

Perhaps our ultimate folly, in respect to usual arts practice and research etiquette, is to publish a chapter about an artwork that is far from finished. The risk here is outlining a utopia that is a true ‘no place’,¹ an unsubstantiated claim to future success of an artwork that does not and may never exist. However, lingering in this period where it still could be perfect is delicious. But there will be trouble in paradise. The whole point of the project is to taste the grit in the oyster. It’s not about utopia, but rather about bootstrapping ourselves out of now through action. It’s doing and testing the edges of our expectations and best intentions together. It’s time to ‘Stop asking WHAT start asking HOW’ (Kwaymullina 2020: 245).

Our artwork is a microcosm of a wider project of progressive societal change, though it may also appear as a collapse. This work chimes, for example, with the Dark Mountain Project’s witnessing of a period of ‘Uncivilization’ outlined in the first three of eight principles in their provocative manifesto:

We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.

We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.

We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilization: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.

(Kingsnorth and Hine 2009)

The aspirations of the Dark Mountain Project echo some of ours, though their euro-centric positioning strikes discord. From our perspective, the civilization they are witnessing the decline of is the same civilization that declared Terra Nullius and attempted to eradicate the first nations of Australia. Even the invocation of civilization, a concept emerging from its opposition to the equally problematic term ‘nature’, highlights a broken and binary European ideal that wrenches the human from the animal, the mind from the body, society from the terrestrial environment, and knowledge from the material circumstances of the universe we are bound up with. And yet, we also perceive the decay at the heart of colonial civilization’s enterprise, the corruption in its founding myths. However, for those never deemed civil or human enough, the proposition of going feral is not dreadful, but an opportunity.

Though we are not accelerationists, we are sanguine, and are facing the possibility that, as veteran social scientist Mayer Hillman notes, ‘accepting the impending end of most life on Earth [caused by civilisational over-consumption] might be the very thing needed to help us prolong it’ (cited in Barkham 2018: n.pag.). We are sceptical of settler-colonial civilization’s capacity to adapt quickly enough to avert disaster, and like Hillman are beginning to realize that ‘even if the world went to zero-carbon today [it] would not save us because we've gone past the point of no return’ (cited in Barkham 2018: n.pag.). Like Hillman, we remain sceptical of the individuals produced by this civilization’s capacity to make responsible decisions that benefit the collective. For example: ‘Can you see everyone in a democracy volunteering to give up flying? Can you see the majority of the population becoming vegan? Can you see the majority agreeing to restrict the size of their families?’ (cited in Barkham 2018: n.pag.).

Our lives within these civilizations make it clear to us how hard it is to keep the big picture in mind. It is difficult to hold onto youth and hope and love. Hard to hear the quiet inner voice amongst the myriad deliberate distractions. Difficult to maintain intimacy and oneness with nature. Mindfulness is hard, it takes practice and effort. It is also hard to be good, to balance personal needs with the needs of other people, our environments and society. This is why we are doubting. We live in a time when difficult thoughts are besieged by ease. A self-care response to the trauma of our civilization is to retract from it and to delegate the thinking to others, including machines. The precedent for denying climate chaos was rehearsed through hundreds of years of denying Indigenous people human rights. While we love the individual, we mistrust the ideology that moulds our perspectives.

We are also sadly familiar with myriad previous ‘threats’ to ‘humanity’ by war and biology and machines and climate and non-humans. However, we take some solace in the realization that there never was one civilization or humanity against which all others were measured, as what it means to be civilized and be human has been and remains in a state of perpetual contestation. It is time to rethink, redo and rehearse a [post] humanity in a moment when ‘the national mean temperature for November was the highest on record for Australia as a whole, at 2.47°C warmer than average’ (Bureau of Meteorology 2020) and for the first time ‘global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass’ (Elhacham et al. 2020: 442).

Much of western thought finds its end point in the foundations of Indigenous Knowledge: that our flesh is not ours alone and our bodies comprise more non-human life than human; that the individual is a porous being extending into the environment beyond the body, while the environment simultaneously extends into us; that the physical structure of our brains is shaped and moulded by the environments, languages, algorithmic rituals and beings around us, to the point that we might consider ourselves to be distributed throughout many brains and bodies, many objects and places. For this we use the term radical empathy to attempt to incorporate a more-than-human sensibility into our planning. Feeling ourselves to be part of a collective, a wider us that our civilization denies, reminds us that most people already know precisely what we are talking about, but often do not have the language to articulate it.

Take for example the phenomenon of conducting conversations with friends and relatives who are no longer present. We hear them in our dreams, our interactions with them have shaped our brains, and part of them is mirrored inside of us, as we were mirrored within them. Different people hold and unlock us. They can converse with us when we are not there. They can use us to think with. Most people already know this and experience it every day, though it has been convenient for us to deny and to deride such thoughts as anti-scientific heresy. However, we note that the mystery of being more-than or less-than oneself, and held in the mind of others as we hold them, has been a preoccupation of some Western artists through the ages, and is often tied up with love:

Whenever I see someone who has some virtue […] I am compelled to fall in love with him […] so utterly that I am no longer mine.

(Michelangelo c.1546, cited in Cambon 2014: 42)

He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

(Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights [1847: 70])

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

(Walt Whitman, Song of Myself [1892: 1])

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

(James Baldwin, interviewed in Telling Talk from a Negro Writer [Howard 1963: 89])

The unspeakable forces of capital, white supremacy, slavery and genocide that severed James Baldwin from the cultural knowledge he rediscovered in books continue to torment us. We see the failure to reconcile with the damage that civilizational ‘progress’ has caused as the root of our collective failure to respond adequately to the climate emergency. As we dream of ways to grow through this wicked problem we seek to simultaneously indigenize and decolonize settler-colonial civilization. This is Australia’s rite of passage. Not the end of a ‘civilization’ but the birth of a greater, humbler, project. These aims, and the prospect of not meeting them, guide our artwork Child of Now.

Child of Now – What we (think we) know

We are creating the framework for the Child of Now project that will enable an increasingly diverse cohort of collaborators to join, including thousands of members of the public, who will populate the archive of the next century with their decisions, words and holograms of their bodies. Our job is to create the circumstances that enable participation, which includes creating compelling stimuli and environments for generative encounters to take place. Our role is also to design for diverse participation and to create an invitation to prospective collaborators that is worthy of their attention. But before we talk more about this, let us outline how we currently imagine the project, appreciating that this will change considerably as we move into production.

The public will engage in the project in two parts. In part one, ‘Gathering’, which takes place over a year, the future archive will be created. In part two, ‘Existence’, which takes ten days, the archive performs the collectively authored Child of Now as a ritual vigil (Figure 1.1).

A blue and white diagram depicting the stages of Child of Now where thousands of people enter, donate a body scan and recordings of their imaginations of the future. A year later the recordings are shuffled into age order and replayed for one minute at a time as a giant hologram.

FIGURE 1.1: Xavier Irvine/Robert Walton, Early Child of Now Overview Diagram: Gathering and Existence, 2018. Digital image. Courtesy of the artists.

The Gathering invites one person at a time to ‘fill the shoes’ or ‘take the place’ of the Child of Now during a single day in the future and to imaginatively respond as the Child of Now to the circumstances they find themselves in. As they do this, their decisions for and performance of the Child of Now is recorded and becomes part of the future archive. During the Existence vigil, the holograms and decisions stored in the archive are replayed in the age order of participants over ten days until, inevitably, the Child of Now comes to the end of its life. It is in this way that the project embodies the art of speculative thinking – generating a portrait of the current population engaged in the act of imagining the next century. Our utopian aim is to create a portrait that reflects the diversity of current and future Naarm. It is therefore critical