COSMIC SLOP: Possibilities of Alien Futures (From the Past)

Abstract

The elite imaginaries of our world hold a monopoly over the future, drawing power from the particular ‘utopias’ they promote as a kind of currency to induce a psychosomatic investment in a specific future of society. This displaces the material and temporal content of actually lived exploitation today. In considering the ways in which power now operates predictively as much as retrospectively, we explore the conditions for shaping an asymmetrical politics of transformation beyond the hyperbolic tropes of our current future. To this end, we argue that alien-theory can help to conjure new tomorrows through a focus on the creative power of non-being, disconnection, exploitation and alienation. In collecting together critical threads running through ‘science fiction capital’, cyborg theory, Afrofuturism and Xenofeminism, we synthesize a series of ‘alien-on-earth’ approaches to this futures-crisis in the context of a neoliberal present where our relationship with the experience of alienation has been fundamentally changed, altered and reformed. In speaking to the ways in which we can begin to decolonise this future-monopoly, we explore the concept of chronopolitics as a collective effort for unearthing different histories, mapping alternative spatio-temporalities and reshaping our present conditions in the now of time.

Affiliations

[1 ] York University, Department of Politics

Ross Building, Room S672

4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON

M3J 1P3, Canada

Contributors

Lina Nasr El Hag Ali

A.T. Kingsmith

Conference

Publication date: May 2018

Publication date (Print): May 2018

Pages: 1-8

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/EVAC18.26

Copyright statement: © Ali et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. Proceedings of EVA Copenhagen 2018, Denmark

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Politics of the Machines - Art and After

Conference acronym: EVA Copenhagen

Conference number: 7

Conference location: Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark

Conference date: 15 - 17 May 2018

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Digital arts and culture

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EVAC18.26

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing