‘Back to the future’
Eva-Maria Magel
(English translation)
The present is complex enough? Then welcome to the parallel worlds of what lies ahead. In the year of quantum technology, art looks at everything that’s possible between the compulsion of acting quickly and the desire of seeing all options: A panorama of futures.
The future was better in the past, Karl Valentin once claimed. In the mean time we are located in a present, that used to be better. And instead of a future we speak about “futures”. However, once you get used to the cumbersome plural, there are many reasons for optimism. The future depends on many decisions, influences and their share of interaction – enabling a diversity of possible futures. Planetary thinking, a view of the entire context becomes obligatory. |n this respect it isn’t astounding, that essential elements of what plays a role in models of the future, influence modern art enormously at the moment.
Since a few years the debate around nature, her threat but above all her potential have been a big topic in art, especially in Frankfurt and its region. This isn’t just to do with trends, but also with a focus of interest. Exemplary the museum Sinclair-House in Bad Hombug, through the Nature and Art Foundation, dedicates itself to the interaction of these two elements. The Frankfurter Art Association is continuously writing on their series of exhibitions about natural sciences, biodiversity research and art, repeatedly in cooperation with the Senckenberg Society. Many of the exhibitions in this spring and summer season transcend the state of the present, such as the exhibition ‘Undermining the Immediacy’ in the Tower of the Museum for Modern Art Frankfurt.
Certainly no coincidence, the United Nations has just proclaimed the “International Year of Quantum Science and Quantum Technologies”. After all, the diversity of possibilities, the calculation of complex interrelationships, the modelling of futures, which pose huge challenges to our thinking and conventional calculation methods, are receiving an enormous technological boost with quantum science. It fascinates artists – and at the same time, art provides the public with access that is often far easier than reading a scientific essay.
Anyone visiting the last exhibition at the Schirn Art Gallery Frankfurt before it closes for refurbishment and moves to the Bockenheim district may encounter a creature that appears to be a mixture of plant and animal, dancing in nature like a human in self-forgetful being – and a programmed robot moving in front of landscape images assembled by artificial intelligence. The ‘Buenavista’ by the artist collective Troika, this ‘beautiful view’, is fake – or a new reality. Our perception readily accepts it: This is a view of the future that you might call beautiful or dangerous.
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One hundred years after Heisenberg and Schrödinger, the Giersch Museum at Frankfurt’s Goethe University is now home to British artist Libby Heaney, whose ‘Q is for Climate’ demonstrates what non-binary and non-linear future thinking looks like – in a video art installation. Heaney studied physics and computer science as well as art, has a PhD in quantum information science and writes her own codes for quantum computers, which she uses to create huge works. Scenarios of our environment, including a tentacled creature that should enable us to understand quantum thinking in the art encounter, intuitively so to speak.
Artistic research has long been a buzzword. “Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant” at the Institute of Art Gender Nature at the Basel University of Art and Design is investigating the potential of plant intelligence both artistically and scientifically. The results, in art and for thinking, have now become the exhibition ‘Among Plants’ at the Museum Sinclair-Haus in cooperation with Basel project manager Yvonne Volkart. An approach that fans out the potential of planetary thinking right through to the accompanying publication. The ‘Fixing Futures’ exhibition works in a similar way. After all, it is rare to come across so many double talents between science and art and productive overlaps as now at the Giersch Museum. The museum examines “Planetary futures between speculation and control” and thus redefines itself as a university museum once again. This begins with the scientific dialogues that characterise the catalogue and does not end with the replanting and unsealing of the museum: The fact that the potential of quantum technology is associated with tremendous energy requirements and CO2 emissions is also taken into account.
“Technologies are often seen as a ‘quick fix’. People assume that you only need the right technology to solve the problems,” says Ina Neddermeyer, Director of the Giersch Museum. However, with the realisation that the world has become more complex, the approach is also becoming more differentiated. Something that art and science have in common. Neddermeyer and her team found what they were looking for for the scientific part directly at Goethe University, where the graduate programme ‘Fixing Futures’ deals with anticipation in an interdisciplinary way. Positions from geophysics, quantum computing and anthropology are included in interviews in the exhibition, while artistic works in the individual rooms deal with topics such as climate, the environment and post-colonialism. Visitors can comment on this at ‘participation stations’. How this data will be processed later is still open. Who knows what modelling they will one day be used for.
When robots take over dancing: View of the exhibition “Troika, Buenavista”, in Frankfurts Schirn Art Gallery.
Photo: Alvin Ley / SCHIRN Kunsthalle Frankfurt
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