2013-01-11 Ivana Hilj and Caetano Carvalho "Society for the Preservation of Future Ruins"












Society for the Preservation of Future Ruins
by Ivana Hilj and Caetano Carvalho

Somewhere, in the space that opens between an unfinished past and a reopened future, a future anterior. 
"Are you a technoptimist or a depressimist?" he asks. " Well, here we are." she says "spending the last weeks of this year digging for digital fossils. Sampling, documenting, collecting. As if the pile of vestiges of outmoded objects we have accumulated so far wasn't enough." The pile of vestiges of outmoded objects had accumulated into a melancholic, never completed, long-deserted archive, which now sits in ruins, that long awaited statement from another age (that was, or to come). " The demise of that failed futuristic vision was, is inevitable." A short silence follows "Ah! " she continues "We've been looking for some illumination on the turns of history, but these remnants do not posses the revolutionary energies we hoped to find. They are enigmas without resolution, let alone redemption. The only presences to be found in history are ghosts of repetition. Memory has lost all of its restorative power. The future, too…. Does this answer your question?" "I like to think (it has to be!) / of a cybernetic ecology / where we are free of our labors / and joined back to nature, / returned to our mammal / brothers and sisters, / and all watched over / by machines of loving grace." He chants.

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