Hacking Futurities

Hacking Futurities

Program Curated by Trevor Van de Velde

Hacking Futurities is a program of video works that explore our relationship to technology and cultural identity.  These works investigate multiple Asian Futurities, questioning what cultural artefacts become archived, evolved, or lost in transition. This program spans across multiple mediums, including documentary, fiction, and music video, and each addressing various aspects of our transitions to futurity. From 3D renders of Middle Eastern Mythology to memories and still-life in the post-digital, Hacking Futurities represents a resistance against being temporally othered – how western depictions of futurities often erase culturality for uniformity and ostracize marginalized communities. How do we recontextualize technology, tools and machines, for people whom it was not originally designed for? 

Xin Wang states that Asian futurisms are situated within a techno-precarity: where the entire continent of Asia is simultaneously exoticized as a cybernetic other and yet becomes the site of fictional dystopia. These artists engage with that precarity, visualizing and sonifying these futurities and conditions. However it is important to understand that there is not just a single futurity. These artists operate within simultaneous transitions and infinite futurities.

Screening Program:

HINDOO WARRIOR || Rohan Chander (performed by Lucy Yao and Dorothy Chan), 2021, United States, 9:57

HINDOO WARRIOR is a music video composed by Rohan Chander that explores themes of immigrancy, perennial metamorphosis, and the forces to examine one’s hierarchical pluralities using digital media. The performer, Lucy Yao and Dorothy Chan, become avatars within this world, performing through instances of glitch, corruption and digital erasure. Near the end, Chander states “This is a transition. You are a transition. I am not a transition. Transitions” This syntax becomes a digitally spoken mantra that raises awareness to our roles as beings in a world consumed with cutting edge technology, and digital awareness. 

Reality Fragment 160921 || Qigemu, 2018, Sweden, 14:01

Reality Fragment 160921 is the debut film by duo, Qigemu 七個木 (April Lin & Jasmine Lin) that explores their connectedness to each other’s bodies, space, and reality through the blurring of self-narrative and docu-fiction. Reality Fragment 160921 follows two people in their process for “reality-curation” in which they communicate through digital spaces and archived memory. These spaces are compared and explored through personal realites to create a hybrid space in which their bodies, memories and energies co-exist. The viewer is invited to be a witness to their space and tasked to self-reflect about our own reality fragments.

She Who Sees the Unknown: HUMA || Morehshin Allahyari, 2016, United States, 6:04

Morehshin Allahyari’s project She Who Sees the Unknown, is a research project in which Allahyari re/creates “mounstrous female/queer figures of Middle Eastern origin, using a combination of 3D modeling, 3D scanning, and 3D printing.  In this iteration of the project, titled HUMA, Allahyari re-tells the story of HUMA, a jinn known in various Middle Eastern tales and myths that provides heat to the body. Her film re-situates the jinn in relation to Global Warming, and acts as a figure, in charge of decolonizing Western centric approaches to climate change.

Myth of Modernity || Chulayarnnon Siriphol, 2014, Thailand, 16:00

“Myth of Modernity” focuses on Thai Buddhism, specifically the simplification over time of architectural structures of worship. Siriphol emphasizes on how these ornate temples, pagodas, and spirit houses represent multiple aspects of Buddhist Cosmology. Siriphol juxtaposes these structures with a neon pyramid: a symbol for the West’s need to reduce and simplify structures therefore drawing a parallel between this simplification of structures and the state of current Thai politics. Siriphol then equates the political realm to be similar to to the religious realm thereby poking at the idealism and simplification present in politics and demonstrations.