The present of the future - a new climate for art

caption

More and more the medium of art will also have to deal with what will be viewed as art in the future - or possibly  will also bring something completely new to the fore. Especially today, exploring and thinking ahead of alternative spaces of possibility, as has been practiced for a long time in science fiction literature or especially in climate change research, is becoming more and more topical.  "When the impossible becomes possible, it appears to many as a miracle " (Alard von Kittlitz) - and only then do we realize that  it has become possible today to make something impossible that has fallen out of time - without us having to regard it as a miracle - but will soon be able to.  

What if there was such a special, exclusive and sometimes difficult to understand phenomenon as Art could no longer give in the form we know, but in a completely different way? Or to put it another way: Couldn't works of art be transformed into a setting for a future that could question our present day from unexpected, weird and unfamiliar perspectives? But they are not as strange and distant as these questions sound. In a way, the future is already present.

The future arises when its apparent impossibility is transformed into real thoughts now will - especially if we  Don't (yet) know exactly whether it's a fictional present or a real future. Or maybe about their simultaneity? It is only through trial and error, by replacing the present with the impossible, that it becomes conceivable to transform something thought impossible into a space beyond the present. In this way, we also understand our past in a new way: We remember earlier times like past present, the future of which seemed completely unknown to us. Today many things seem increasingly no longer impossible to us.  

We can always be more conscious chronologically assess how we can now shape the directions of the impossible in a present that has become future. That we are able to do this we owe not only to digital technology in the form of model simulations, but simply to our ability to relate various improbable possibilities as "futures" in our present.  So we make a future that has now become the present possible for the first time through exactly this representation - and thus what was previously thought to be impossible much more probable.     

Michael Kroeger