The Future of Indeterminacy: Datification, Memory, Bio-politics

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The future is no longer seen as open. It is seen as precarious on the one hand and technologically over-determined on the other. Economic uncertainty, the rise of the risk society, the culture of fear and neoliberal necropolitics - the politics of 'making and letting die' (Mbembe 2003) - are seen as a serious threat. While the risk society attributes all hazards to human decisions, the culture of fear cultivates the tendency to catastrophise. Neoliberal necropolitics welds technology to the exploitation of natural and social reserves in an irreversible way creating a sense of closure and doom. Instead of lamenting the uncertainty of a 'cancelled future' (Berardi 2014) or the 'end of free will' induced by big-data's predictions (Han 2017), this interdisciplinary project reverses the question. It asks: what is the future of indeterminacy? Initially derived from Gödel's undecidability and Stengers and Prirogine's non-linear dynamics in which order emerges spontaneously from chaotic systems, indeterminacy is a self-perpetuating dynamic of change. It has no beginning or end, no spatial or temporal constancy. It upsets the existing structures and ossified power regimes, which is why it was embraced as a liberating force by the 1960s, and, again, by the 1990s artists and theorists such as Cage, Fluxus, Xenakis, Derrida, Guattari, Hayles and Varela, all of whom sought to implement indeterminate procedures, in thought and action, in their respective fields. In the digital age, in accelerated, informational capitalism, the situation is very different. First, permanent change is the rule. Second, art, culture, and politics are no longer separate; they are fused in the cultural sphere located in the infosphere. Consisting of the internet, cultural production, datification, algorithmic predetermination, symbolic as well as affective regimes, the infosphere has modified the language and forms of thought and action. It has also modified the structure of reality. Re-mobilising Poggioli's concept of the avant-garde as inherently reproducible in other art forms and, importantly, in mainstream culture (1972), this project will develop a new understanding of the relationship of artistic indeterminacy to current cultural practices via four distinct research activities:1. Case studies of the 1960s and 1990s indeterminate practices (Fluxus, Situationists International, etoy and Knowbotic Research) that disrupt semantic, visual, aural and kinaesthetic ordering and normativity in order to understand the full impact of their methodologies on present-day artistic and cultural practices.2. Comparing these analyses to the 2010s indeterminacy that sabotages tracking and dataveillance, namely: glitching, obfuscation, databending and dissipative networks found in the work of such artists-activists as Nissenbaum, Cardenas, Cates, Menkman, Norby, Szauder, Biggs and Fujihata, which reconfigure (virtual and actual) existential spaces by dis-ordering cultural memory. Here case studies will be combined with hands-on workshops. 3. Forming hypotheses about the relationship of the (rapidly changing) digital unconscious to future media ecologies as related to media's profound somatic, social and cultural working via a series of art-science talks, an international conference, and a special issue of Leonardo (MIT Press).4. Re-evaluating artistic indeterminacy's deconstruction of the cause-effect, parts-and-wholes relationship in light of its 'big questions', questions that have persisted from Surrealist Craven's 1920s practice of 'impulsive living' to Davis's 2018 work with chance-operated genetic coding, namely: Is sequence (linear, circular or patterned) the only way of constructing knowledge? Is the constant linking of events to the experience archive - personal and cultural identity - a necessity? Or, can we engage heterogeneity independently of any whole-ness and constancy? These questions will be explored in a monograph.