FUTURE MANIFESTOS – Konferanse
DIGS, Krambugata 2 / 10. & 11. APRIL, 10:00 – 14:30
Gratis inngang.
Kurator: Zane Cerpina
A Manifesto for Luddite Innovation
Technological decline as meaning-giving cultural paradigm
Cameroonian historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe argues that “toxicity, that is, the multiplication of chemical substances and dangerous waste [is] a structural dimension of the present”. Indeed, when we consider electricity provision, the precondition of contemporary technoculture, toxicity is the fundamental paradigm. No matter what method of power generation is used – solar panels, wind mills, nuclear fission – if the computing power per capita in the Global North were made accessible to every subject on earth, the amount of toxic debris – solid and gaseous – would become unmanageable.
Hence, the task is straightforward: technoculture, as it is lived in the Global North and idealized on a global scale, must be dismantled. Like the Luddites, the English textile workers who destroyed the mechanical looms that took their means of existence – both economically and in terms of artisanal pride – in the 1800s, we now need to start the destruction of advanced technological systems.
But to what technological state would we need to return in order to reach a healthy, unalienated cultural condition? Neo-Luddites and future primitivists have attempted to answer this question in the past, but it is actually obsolete. Just like expansionist technological innovation is not guided by a predefined ideal condition (save the dreams of some singularity extremists), innovation of technological decline does not need a vision of an ideal end state.
This raises another question, though: how can this approach be more than a nihilist drive to the bottom and become a cultural paradigm that is meaningful and fulfilling in itself? Taking Henri Bergson’s concept of intuition as a starting point, I call for a technoculture that cherishes creative and innovative ways to induce technological decline. In this practice of luddite innovation, the process of destruction becomes a fulfilling creative act in itself, an artwork that counters the toxicity of technological expansion.
Dani Ploeger [UK/NL/DE]
Dani Ploeger is an artist and cultural critic who explores situations of conflict and crisis on the fringes of the world of high-tech consumerism. His work spans a broad range of forms, from media art, installations, and film to performance art, anarchist engineering, and cultural theory. It is often informed by field research on the use of everyday technologies under extraordinary circumstances. He has made a VR installation while accompanying frontline troops in the Russo-Ukrainian war, travelled to dump sites in Nigeria to collect electronic waste originating from Europe, and stolen razor wire from the so-called ‘high-tech fence’ on the EU outer border in Hungary. He is currently working on the development of anarchist technologies for the Rojava Revolution in North-East Syria.
Dani’s artwork has been exhibited worldwide, including at ZKM Karlsruhe, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Nairobi National Museum, the London Film Festival, the Eunam Museum of Art, the Lviv Museum of Ethnography, and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. His book Deserted Devices and Wasted Fences: Everyday technologies in extreme circumstances was published with Triarchy Press in 2021.
Dani holds a PhD from the University of Sussex (UK) and is currently Professor of Performance and Technology at the University of Music and Theatre Munich. He is also Artistic Director of Fabricatie – a platform for art and industry in the Netherlands, and a Fellow at V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam. In 2022, he initiated the Rojava Center for Democratic Technologies in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.
www.daniploeger.org / https://v2.nl/publications/destructive-circuits
