The issue of infrastructure is becoming more and more complex. We used to deal with timetables for trains, buses, ships and airplanes, and manual bookkeeping. Now we deal with distribution of data and products and with processing, and it seems we have looped ourselves into a kind of effective and at the same time ineffective perpetuum mobile of conquering new technologies, which are supposed to make our work and communication easier. We devote a lot of time to purchasing technology and discovering how it functions, because technology enables systematic, international and global inclusion. On the other hand, we are being closed inside hard digitalization systems at the local, national, European and global level. These ensure a consistent and accurate implementation of legal, economic and social rules, but fail to take sufficient account of the increasingly shrunken potential of people’s individual aspects. By the year 2023, all Europeans will have electronic drivers’ licenses, and it is predicted that by 2027, we are all going to be sitting in automatic, sensor-operated cars. In this way the automotive industry, hand in hand with the European economic and technological policies, is planning its survival and growth. Which means that with older and not so well equipped cars it will be harder and harder to be legally involved in the road infrastructure. When Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou envisioned Metropolis as an eclectic futuristic space, they imagined bridges connecting high skyscrapers as a form of transportation infrastructure; their trains, cars and airplanes are classified in an aesthetic order, which reveals the external, displayable side of the infrastructure: picturesque, like a free artistic composition, where vehicles, vessels and pedestrians softly blend together, without any collisions, which have, de facto, blocked the development of flying cars. From today’s point of view, their idea of infrastructure appears naive and simplistic; they probably could not have imagined that flying cars would require a well-defined infrastructure for an exponential growth of road users in 4D space. Theirs and other dystopias, displays of how the society of the future will function, are a common theme
in science-fiction book and film creations, such as 1984 by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451; they draw attention to society, the environment, politics, economy, religion, psychology, ethics, science and technology. The dystopians view the ruling elite pessimistically as ruthless, so the opposition stands for a “rebellion” that seeks change in society. Contemporary reality reflects dictatorship in a broader sense: on the one hand, the privatization of living conditions, from land to water, and, on the other, the global commands of large corporations. The difference between command, rendering, and display is roughly something like this: the command is dry and digitally rigid, complex commands require a long time for computation, optimization, synthesis, and execution; there are ever smaller variations in the measurements, and the display is merely an external, visible form of the digital command and its execution, which divinely misleads in terms of marketing. If 1984 exposed dangerous products on the black market, then this underground activity has long surfaced by now, and has become the strongest market trend, from weapons to chemical and biological toxins that flood the global market. Our perspective on technology, which is the one and only structure of all infrastructures today, has changed since the 1970s, and the techno-utopia based on advances in science and technology that is supposed to bring about utopia, is shattering. An ideal society, set in the near or far future, where the laws, government and social conditions would work exclusively to the benefit and well-being of all residents, is getting narrower and narrower. Contemporary artistic considerations analyze the state of the human being and spirit in a given place of existence. They did not necessarily choose this place, they may have been forced there or born into it, or have naturally grown into it through identity and culture, or have become adapted to it by force. Artists still draw skeletons and concepts, narrate (un)comprehensible stories, play with the senses of the body, put on different identities, in order to analyze the displays and get to the essence of the commands. So they can understand the current manifested world and the person in it. The process of artistic-interdisciplinary research work is still ongoing, in the same way as it was once laid out, in the renaissance spirit of connection and utopia, by Leonardo da Vinci.
COMANDS AND DISPLAYS
The final in a cycle of four large-scale interdisciplinary international exhibitions as part of the project Risk Change, entitled Tense Present, unfolds across hidden levels of systemic infrastructures. Among all four exhibitions, it is the most difficult to read and consequently requires the most time to be invested in the understanding of contemporary works of art.
