Art Department: Phase 1

Agence Future grew from an independent project by Bram Goots (photographer) and Maya van Leemput (futurist) that started in 01999. During the first years of the millennium, the two travelled in 25 countries, spread over five continents to conduct interviews with more than 300 people who shared their ideas, images and feelings about personal, local and global futures. It is now more than ten years ago the team was on the road with recumbent bicycles, carrying the required technology for recording and distributing their work, interviewing in ten European countries.

Cross section of the future city, with many traffic levels underground; top, street for pedestrians only, and airplane landing fields, above. "The step-back skyscrapers of the future will have moving stairs on the outside of the buildings instead of elevators, with facilities for passengers to alight at any floor," declared Harvey Wiley Corbett, noted city planner. "Some of the skyscrapers will be a half mile high and will house small-sized cities." Major Henry H. Curran of New York, opposes Mr. Corbett and points to the impossibilities of such buildings in terms of human happiness as well as construction, saying, "There are everyday workers who count their ribs on release from the elevators and subways that take them to their offices. They must pop out of kiosks like prairie dogs." TRUE! The tallest building in today's world is Burj Khalifa in Khalifa. At 2,684 feet, it's just over a half mile high, although its use is primarily commercial and it lacks the moving stairs.

‘What does history look like? How do you draw time? Cartographies of Time is the first history of the timeline, written engagingly and with incredible visuals. The authors, both accomplished writers and historians, sketch the shifting field of graphic representations of history from the beginning of the print age through the present. They shed light on western views of history and on the complex relationship between general ideas about the course of events and the technical efforts to record and connect dates and names in the past. In addition to telling a rich, forgotten story, this book serves as a kind of grammar of historical representation, uncovering the ways in which time has been structured in thought and in images, in the Western tradition. Written for both the academically curious and the general reader, Cartographies of Time provides a set of tools for understanding the evolution and the significance of graphic representations of time both in history and in contemporary culture.’

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Beth Campbell ‘Future Past’ 21 7/8  x  29 7/8  inches, each Pen and Pencil on paper

We believe in Utopia, not as a destination but as a direction.

“The exhibition, on view until the end of this month, consists of a large wooden table in the middle of the room, stacked with banned books from different countries around the world. The most head-scratch worthy books included Dora The Explorer, banned in Malaysia, and Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, once banned in China. On the floor around the table are large piles of shredded photocopied pages from 50 other banned books, and dangling above those heaps are clusters of rifle bullets, which at certain angles of the room look like they're aiming right at the readers' heads.”

Excerpt from the book: An Ethical Global Information Society: Culture and democracy revisited, Jacques J. Berleur, Diane Whitehouse 

Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future (1990) is a speculative book written by Scottish geologist Dougal Dixon and illustrated by Philip Hood. The theme of the book is a hypothetical exploration of the possibilities of the future evolution of humans.

Because of the ban, this film is available for pay-per-view streaming in all territories except for Singapore.

Thelma Golden, curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, talks through three recent shows that explore how art examines and redefines culture. The "post-black" artists she works with are using their art to provoke a new dialogue about race and culture — and about the meaning of art itself.

“From the successful startups springing up thus far across the African continent, it’s fascinating to see the embodiment of what has, up until now, really been confined to the province of Afrofuturist theory. Businesses like Dropifi and RetailTower are unintentional examples of how differing philosophies of technology impact the kind of tech that gets made...In much of Africa, technology is mostly associated with development since it equalizes the playing field between gender, ethnicities, race, and nationalities rather than supposedly destroying working-class jobs and making humans more dependent on terrifying AI. This intrinsically humanist view of technology is something you see in many African cultures throughout history — consider the Barongo ironworkers of Northwestern Tanzania where reproductive symbolism was used to describe metalworking tools and workspaces — and it’s interesting to speculate about subconscious connectives, linking the past to the present.”

Created by Martin Wattenberg, with Marek Walczak.

"Robots I believe will collect my work. But you don't need to be a robot to enjoy it."

Yael Bartana ‘True Finn – Tosi suomalainen’, 2014 One channel video and sound installation, 50 min. For her IHME Project 'True Finn' Yael Bartana invited people living in Finland to take part in creating an utopian moment. The condition was that each person has a different ethnic, religious and political background. As a result of an open call, eight Finnish-resident individuals came to live together for seven days in a house in the countryside. Life, discussions and specifically designed assignments were filmed, with the edited material now forming the core of this artwork. What happens when these people live together for a week and re-define Finnishness, and themselves in relation to others? The artwork plays with questions about identity: How does national identity operate as a means of inclusion and exclusion? What mechanisms exist for this in Finland? What are we talking about when we talk about Finnish identity right now? Can an immigrant become a true Finn? 

In his groundbreaking intervention, "Mining the Museum" (1992), Fred Wilson transformed the Maryland Historical Society’s collection to highlight the history of slavery in America.