Laresa Kosloff: New Futures™ Room Sheet

The Paradox of Agency

How to be a Cybernetic Activist in a Post-truth World

Laresa Kosloff’s dystopian works Radical Acts and New Futures™ are on show during a season of heatwaves and extreme fire danger warnings on Taungurung country in rural Victoria. However, this simple statement can no longer be determined as factual, despite the heat we all feel on our skin, the images of a troubled future we see in the exhibit and the warnings that ping on our phones. We are in a post-truth world, and as Kosloff’s prescient works have foretold, our diabolically manipulated feelings couldn’t give a stuff about facts anymore. Good-faith pundits and analysts must now use a metaphor from DC Comics to distinguish between factual and posttruth realities – Earth One and Earth Two. As illusory new worlds divide and multiply like cancer cells, and Kosloff exhibits at the Benalla Art Gallery, a man who sounds exactly like Elon Musk is appearing on multiple radical disinformation and conspiracy-oriented media platforms. He fiercely supports Musk’s anti-woke and entrepreneurial agendas and debates his critics, but claims not to be the real billionaire contrarian. Arguments rage online as millions of his followers and critics speculate as to whether he is indeed Elon with a shadow account and identity, or a fanboy imitator, or even an AI generated robot.

In a new age of fake news (now the term for good-faith journalism), deep fakes and fascist conspiracy cults, it is hard to know or care about what may be the genuine reality of this situation. It no longer really matters. We live in a multiversal world of illusion, where a plethora of truths have overtaken any consensus on reality. And Kosloff saw it all coming.

She created Radical Acts in 2020, the year the world tipped upside down, then New Futures™ in 2021, the year we all began adjusting to the new abnormal, only to find that world would keep flipping, flipping and flipping again. The fractal, mercurial illusions of our information landscapes and identitarian activism today are shaking the cultural and material foundations of reality.

Laresa Kosloff is still real, though. In our yarns together she mapped for me the earth she inhabits with spiritual, political and ancestral integrity. Her father-side family comes from Siberia, having fled the chaos of the Russian revolution, trekking through Asia to eventually arrive in Australia. Her family carries cautionary tales about the illusions of ideology and uprisings, of how the rebels quickly become the evil empire when they inherit power, rebooting the whole cyclic regime of oppression again, and again. She now lives in Williamstown on Boonwurrung Country, awaiting each year the sandpiper birds who migrate from her Siberian homelands, turning her world around between poles for each revolution of the earth around the sun.

History doesn’t necessarily repeat, but it certainly rhymes and there are poetic devices available to artists to divine the patterns of past, present and future. The Tsars invented disinformation and shit-posting, using the first printing presses to smear Jewish people, redirecting the rage of the oppressed in order to stall the collapse of the feudal system. Today, Russia escalates the West’s culture wars online to interfere with elections and weaken sovereignty from within. Kosloff has spent time in the pre-modern villages of her old people, and walked the streets of Russian cities, noting the decrepit and redundant monuments to revolutionaries and dictators. “Time always wins out,” she says. Her foundations in eastern European heritage and Islamic faith lead her to the conclusion that “Empire ruins everything,” which inflects her critiques of capitalism, consumerism and post-truth malaise with a wry but playfully post-modern perspective.

Kosloff’s work is speculative dystopian-future science-fiction, narrated in past tense but located in an elongated present merging with the near-future. In this fluid echo of the unfolding fifth industrial revolution, high-tech thoughttinkering becomes reality, then reality rebels and activists win the day, only to find themselves overtaken by an overwhelming backlash instigated by the powerful. Dominance and moral highground positions shift back and forth in

a multi-polar arms race of weaponised illusions that blur the lines between digital fantasy and embodied agency. These works were created before the current panic about creative artificial intelligence, but take on new meaning and a haunting prescience as more novel applications and terrifying potentials of automation are revealed year by year.

Her predictive analysis method is novel and brilliant. She outsources her future modeling to the corporate PR and marketing stock footage industry. In this highly competitive marketplace there are strong profit-based incentives for accurately predicting what media assets will be required from quarter to quarter, and production costs are high for creating content that will match emerging trends and markets before they appear. The employers of the clip and image creators must mine terabytes of data using increasingly sophisticated algorithms, to feed automated predictive modeling systems that can navigate the dark data landscapes of behavioural economics.

She trawls through these vast deposits of cultural speculation, mining the miners, divining narrative pathways and cultural desire lines yet unborn to navigate the extended present of tomorrow, as only a true artist can. She manipulates clip subjects, who she says are “like puppets, waiting to be used”. But she is not exploitative in this process; she avoids the othering or exclusion of her subjects, which she sees as power’s narrative method of justifying extraction and destruction. She plays with the puppets, guided by her theory of art: “If it’s play it will work; if it’s work it won’t.”

Existing at the nexus of opposite poles in the global north and south, while intersecting with the fraught geopolitical histories of east and west, she manages to transcend time and space through these radical acts of jiu-jitsu that turn the artefacts of late-stage capitalism into feedback loops of subversive meaningmaking.

Like the rebels in her stories, Kosloff is hacking the black boxes of digital warfare with the more traditional skillsets of analogue humanity. But the tales caution us: the semi-automated machinations of power may be disrupted this way, but only temporarily, as the oppressors have chosen the battlefield. The competitive dynamics of revolutionary zero-sum games can only ever mean that the advantage changes hands, while the hierarchical paradigm remains the same.

This multipolar trap, in which the collective good is subverted by bad actors seeking evolutionary advantage, means that adversaries must struggle to develop faster-bigger-better technologies and optimised states of self-realisation, continually upgrading tools, minds and bodies to keep one step ahead of their enemies in the market and in the field of information warfare. Inevitably, the speed of electrons in digital reality overtakes the slower atoms comprising physical reality, and war makes cyborgs of us all.

These sociopathic tinkerings cannot match the computing power of the ancestral mind, however, which over half a million years has perfected the powerful psycho-technologies of art and story. Kosloff harnesses the magic of narrative to make cultural forecasts that may not be precise in detail, but which accurately map the processes of power systems, propaganda, technology and control. Thus she predicted the bad actors of the East surpassing the bad actors of the West in disinformation operations, because they better operationalised the superpower of storytelling. “Western governments have no story. Even their lies are boring.” While she condemns the radicalising cult dynamics of eastern powers, she also admires the fortitude and grace of many Palestinians who demonstrate “the best of Islam”, inspired by a lore that shows them how to do “something better than anger”.

Kosloff aspires to such collective narratives of integrity, but as an activist in Australia finds herself thwarted by whiteness and settler egotism, both within and without. “As a white person, you have to break through social conditioning. Ego is always in there, messing with everything.” In a hyper-individualised society that stands in vivid contrast with the collective wisdom of her Palestinian brothers and sisters, and the Indigenous Australian communities she admires, she is simultaneously inspired and limited by the personal agency afforded by liberalism. She struggles with the tensions of free will, always asking in her art and activism, “How is the ego excited by agency?”

The ‘radical acts of horizontality’ depicted in her 2020 work is a mass protest undermined by individualism. In an era of personal branding, collective action disintegrates as activism becomes bespoke and personalised, illustrated by her subjects performing civil disobedience by lying down alone, engulfed by vast

landscapes blasted by the same extractive technologies that enable them to perform, record and post their acts of subversion.

However, performance (not to be confused with performativity) is also what Kosloff sees as the key to disruptive activism in the arts. In this she is influenced by Charlie Chaplin, whose work taught her the power of lampooning the hidden structures of oppression in order to reveal them. “Perform it, and the façade becomes easy to see.”

She also sees the trap in this counter-narrative process, though. Stable folk-narratives are coopted and modified to pervert human perception, then truth-speakers emerge only to be coopted anew, in service of autocratic agendas. Abrahamic faith is converted to an accelerationist death wish through corrupting rapture ideologies driving all towards a final battle, a world burnt and renewed for a new age of kings, or a rebooted computer simulation restoring western enlightenment and privilege. All the while, aspiring dictators and strong men shout, “I am your retribution!” to cheering crowds organising and enacting violence to achieve their own annihilation through the death of the biosphere and the elusive dream of equality.

Kosloff’s Radical Acts and New Futures™ represent an attempt to make sense of a world turned upside down during and immediately after Covid lockdowns, when post-modern critique was simplified and weaponised by farright radicals and free-speech became a tool of censorship in the hands of bigoted extremists. Kosloff faces all the political gaslighting and traumatic paradoxes of this inflection point in human history, seeking to answer the riddle of selfterminating power systems in modernity, the cycles of rise and fall expressed in her closing narration taken from Shakespeare’s Richard II (Act 5, Scene 5).

Tyson Yunkaporta

Tyson Yunkaporta is the Senior Lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne and author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World

You can listen to Tyson Yunkaporta’s interview with Laresa Kosloff for The Other Others podcast here

New Futures™ 2021

4K video (made from commercial stock footage), 4:38 duration

Voice actor: Francis Greenslade

Sound design: Final Sound

Music: Secession Studios

Shakespeare from Richard II (Act 5, Scene 5)

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

In New Futures™, a biohacking initiative wages war between the industrious and hyper-charismatic ‘synthetic’ personalities and disgruntled hackers, nostalgic for an apathetic past.

Radical Acts 2020

4K video (made from commercial stock footage), 7:29 duration

Voice actress: Jenny Seedsman

Singing: Violet CoCo from Extinction Rebellion

Sound design: Final Sound

Music: Secession Studios

Light Source commission, Buxton Contemporary, The University of Melbourne, 2020

In Radical Acts, a group of climate scientists clandestinely distribute a pathogen that renders corporate workers less productive and more accepting of motivations beyond profit.

IMAGES

Laresa KOSLOFF New Futures™

Benalla Art Gallery install images, 2024

About the Artist

Born: 1974, Melbourne, Australia

Lives and works: Melbourne, Australia

Laresa Kosloff makes performative videos, Super 8 films, hand drawn animations, sculpture, installations and live performance works. Her practice examines various representational strategies, each one linked by an interest in the body and its agency within the everyday.

An incisive humour is woven throughout all of Kosloff’s work, whether it be in questioning the act of “looking” within the public realm, or drawing out the tensions between received cultural values, individual agency and free will.

Laresa Kosloff is represented by Sutton Gallery in Melbourne

PHOTO 2024

Laresa Kosloff: New Futures™ is an official exhibition of PHOTO 2024 International Festival of Photography (photo.org.au), a major biennial of new photography and ideas taking place from 01–24 March in Melbourne and regional Victoria. Responding to the theme ‘The Future Is Shaped by Those Who Can See It’, PHOTO 2024’s expansive program invites audiences to discover the possible and parallel futures that lie ahead, and how current actions and activisms are shaping future realities. PHOTO 2024 is produced by PHOTO Australia in collaboration with cultural institutions, museums and galleries, and education, industry and government partners.