Keynote: Bruce Sterling (us) - Atemporality

Participants: Alexander Rose (uk), Siegfried Zielinski (de), Mike Sandbothe (de)
Moderator: Jose Luis de Vicente (es)

Henry DeTamble has a genetic disorder known as “chrono-impairment” that causes him to time travel unpredictably. The different dimensions of past, present and future flow into each other, creating a state of atemporality.

The speed of our society is constantly increasing in terms of processes, logistics and media, causing the present to “shrink”. We are experiencing the dissolution of meaningful frameworks in a similar way as Henry DeTamble: in politics, the intervals of planning and acting are reduced to the duration of a legislative period and in post-industrial economics volatile unpredictability has come to replace regular traits of growth and stability. Progress as the paradigm of modernity has been replaced by the continuous modulation of events. If progress is to go beyond the banal indulgences that give rise to a never-ending array of car shell designs then we need to analyse our present time with regard to its aesthetics and its media. The structure of the future has changed, and with it our sense of time. Are we running out of a future as a resource for growth, progress and stability? Has our cultural cruise control become defective?