e-flux Journal #6

<p>Projections of the future that were made in the past are often striking in their bold naïvete—didn’t people understand then that future projections always end up looking like caricatures of past concerns? But whereas these projections do little to actually activate the future they foresaw, they do function as expressions of pure intention, and in this sense they are probably not so naïve. Rather, they indicate a certain bold willingness on the part of people of a certain time to define in explicit terms exactly how the future should function, and indeed, most of these projected futures never come to pass—they remain possibilities that the present still fails to activate. So in this sense, we may not even be talking about the future at all here, or rather we are interested in the future as a stand-in for the “bold naïvete” of speaking about <i>things as they should be</i>.</p> <p>We owe the theme of this issue to Dieter Roelstraete, whose last contribution on the recent “historiographic turn” in art concluded by lamenting the absence of future models available to a current moment marked by an “inability to grasp or even look at the present, much less to <em>excavate the future.</em>” When Zdenka Badovinac offered to respond to the piece, we decided to invite a number of other contributors to write on the topic of “Excavating the Future.” In response to Dieter’s question, what we find is that perhaps the absence of future models is ascribable not to any hopeless lack of universal significance—an absence of ideology—but rather to the very immanence of the future as a kind of offsite space where certain possibilities can be explored momentarily before being drawn back into the reality of the present…</p> <p><b>Editorial</b><br /> Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle</p> <p><b>What Will the Next Revolution Be Like?</b><br /> Zdenka Badovinac</p> <p><b>Concerning Matters to be Left for a Later Date, Part 3 of 4 (Guest-Starring Alexandra Croitoru and Stefan Tiron)</b><br /> Michael Baers</p> <p><b>Learning from Little Haiti</b><br /> Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza</p> <p><b>In Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem</b><br /> Hans Ulrich Obrist</p> <p><b>Architecture Without Architects—Another Anarchist Approach</b><br /> Marion von Osten</p> <p><b>After the Historiographic Turn: Current Findings</b><br /> Dieter Roelstraete</p> <p><b>The Escape Route’s Design: Assessment of the Impact of Current Aesthetics on History and a Comparative Reading Based on an Example Close to the City of Berlin</b><br /> Mariana Silva and Pedro Neves Marques</p>