The Shape of Future Earth: Stable, Unstable, and Metastable

Nová Cvernovka, Bratislava

Participants and Presentations:

Reza Negarestani, Enda O’Riordan, Olexii Kuchanskyi, Sashko Protyah, András Cséfalvay & Lukáš Likavčan

The event will be held in English.

The Shape of Future Earth: Stable, Unstable, and Metastable is a one-day symposium theorising the future of the planet, framed not exclusively as a geological question, but also as a social, political, and artistic one. Tectonic movements, erosions, and eruptions will ineluctably determine the shape of Earth to come in the most literal sense, sometimes in ways that we can influence, and in other cases in ways which we cannot. But to restrict our thinking about future Earth to these questions alone would be tantamount to taking the Earth as an object within which human beings have merely residential status, and over which we understand ourselves to have strictly limited influence. Acknowledging this should not allow us to conclude that human beings have absolute control over the shape of future Earth, nor is it to speculate on the invention of a graven image of ‘Future Earth’, a place modelled entirely according to the human imaginary. What the Earth is, and will be, may always exceed in one dimension or another our attempts to represent it. To represent and understand the world, indeed, to understand how the Earth, present and future, exists according to our representation of it, is an important exercise, one worth attempting even where we take these images to be incomplete. ‘The Shape of Future Earth’ therefore demands that we both try to imagine the future of Earth, as well as critically evaluate our own representations of Earth, both as we understand it now and as we understand its future. The Earth in this sense is neither some mystified object beyond human apprehension, nor is it a product of the human imagination or an intelligent design which corresponds to the very ideas we have of it. The Earth is not just a ‘force of nature’, nor is it a collection of constructed objects deposited on its surface. When we seek to address this question of future Earth, it is not a matter of trying to divine a trajectory from the current state of things, but rather it is a matter of taking seriously the proposition that we as thinkers, artists, and practitioners in other disciplines have a continuing role and responsibility in trying to determine that shape. The point is not to present a completed image, but to participate, each in our own way, in the labour of constructing and bringing to bear what we wish a future Earth to be.

In this symposium, we will attempt to address certain aspects of this question of how future Earth might be shaped. We will not present an exhaustive topology of what this world will be, but will attempt through various discussions and artistic interventions to describe, anticipate, and articulate some of the ways that it could be, and how we might ultimately get there. This will be an interdisciplinary symposium, featuring talks from selected participants, as well as a film screening and artistic presentation

More information at The Július Koller Society website.