19.30 - FuturoGunk Colloquium / Round Table Part II (Louis Armand, Dustin Breitling, Daniel Hüttler & Janina Weißengruber)

Sunday 10 October 2021

FuturoGunk: Struggling for Futures in the CEE

Futurism has always threatened a collusive relationship with the ideology and language of power. Only recently has this aesthetic-political vanguard become potentially emancipated in favor of becoming an open-sourced suffix, a part-object which has reached escape velocity from its previous drive to domination. OR HAS IT?

Since the framing of the retrospective Afrofuturism in 1993, futurism has become tenuously untethered from its complicity with white nation building and class dominance, and has rather become an aesthetic and philosophical frame which lends itself for the purposes of critique, detournement, irony and revision aimed at the language of power – Afrofuturism, Gulf futurism, Sinofuturism, Hungarofuturism, Romafuturism, Ethnofuturisms…

The panel discussion will aim to question what this shift harbors for the diverse region of the CEE. Where does a speculative agon for the future become integrated within an ideological framework aimed at mobilizing a wider and distributed sense of social agency? Where to position contemporary futurism at a time when, in the words of the post-New Left, “the future has been cancelled.” And if we consider hyperstition “the science of self-fulfilling prophecies,” what might we consider the “the art of self-fulfilling prophecies”?

The panel will be split into Part I (Saturday, Oct. 9) and Part II (Sunday, Oct. 10).

Moderated by Vít Bohal

adO/Aptive

AdO/Aptive foments critical thinking, potential action, communication and Otherness by adopting techniques to situate adaptive processes. It was first initiated as a reading group in 2019 and evolved into a fluid identity with its core_members now being Janina Weißengruber and Daniel Hüttler. Besides a regular reading group conducted at school in Vienna (https://www.weloveschool.org/ ) or online, they organize the rA/Upture conference (October 2020 at nadaLokal in Vienna & May 2021 at OFF-Biennial Budapest), work on collective publications and other artistic projects at the intersection of experimentation, speculation and critique.

Louis Armand

Louis Armand is a Prague writer, theorist & visual artist. His novels include, among  others, Vampyr (2020), GlassHouse (2018), The Combinations (Equus, 2016), Abacus (2015). His theoretical works include Videology (2015), Solicitations (2013), Event States (2007), and others. In addition, he is the author of eleven collections of poetry — most recently Monument (with John Kinsella, 2020), East Broadway Rundown (2015), and others. He is formerly an editor of VLAK magazine & Directs the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory at Charles University, Prague.

Official website

Dustin Breitling

Dustin is a PhD student attending Masaryk University, based in Prague and helps organize the Diffractions Collective.