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A missive from the future on the disappearance of now

Kristin Alford

future / present: Thinking about now from further on, thinking about change, invention, loss and innovation.

Chronference Premiere: Melbourne 2014

Inflation, resources, wear and tear. When even the parking meters take credit cards, who needs coins?
And who needs credit cards when electronic transaction via phone become the norm.
And you won’t need keys. Your phone will act as swipe card for entrance to office, house and car.
Reconfiguring our built environments.

as climate change reconfigures our natural ones.
We won’t need fish forks. Seawood moving south will eventually fall off the coast of Australia, taking fish stocks and food sources with it.
no fish, and degradation of coral reefs will put an end to scuba diving as something to enjoy.
And you won’t be drowning sorrows with cheap chocolate as environmental pressures lowers yields on cocoa crops as demand increases.
Both coffee and chocolate will be become a scarce luxury.

We’ll deal with climate change
With more renewables, but it won’t be clunky solar panels, instead textiles and coatings and our building materials will change:
no more bricks made from fly-ash from coal-fired power stations
no more plastics from petrochemicals, instead made from sugars and bio products or 3D printed as required?
so more manufacturing jobs as people produce their own
but perhaps not their own food as farming becomes more industrialised.
no more family farms.

And what we eat will change.
no more honey as bee colonies around the world continue to collapse
no bacon as we question the ethics of slaughtering intelligent animals for food and challenge what’s required to farm sustainably
therefore no more beef. We’ll lab grow protein from pig and cows cells instead, and use technology to grow replaceable organs.

And we’ll lose loss
no more lost luggage as bags are tagged with RFID and we track internet of things
and the internet of pets
and the internet of children, never to be lost, tracked by satellites and GPS from beneath the skin.

We’ll change the way we learn, universities are already in decline.
And the way we work
Sitting in a chair will be ridiculed as being as unsafe as smoking, cubicles disappear as middle-class jobs become automated
And cars and buses become automated
communicating direct vehicle to vehicle to control the traffic without need for external signals like traffic lights. Who will control?

Will email finally be unsupported as corporations only seek to serve what makes a profit?
The end of the open internet
And why do we expect our device to still take form as a phone? the landline is dead
newspapers are in decline, and the infrastructure now just street furniture.
access to production means less reliance on capital intensive equipment
And less reliance on the media moguls that fund it.

whether that’s an end to old men is questionable,
perhaps our funerals will not be black, but only for the young, so much to lose.


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The Object: Past

The Object: Present

The Object: Future

The Lens: Past

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past / present

100 Sentences
by Neil Houghton

The Lens: Present

Waking Time
Eddie Harran

present / past

Dandelion Puff
Phred Peterson

present / present

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present / future

Chrononaut
by Kiri Bear

The Lens: Future

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future / past