The new project by Vuk Ćosić is offered as a room for reflection on the lessons of the history of technology with the following emphases:

• What is the real birthplace of ideas, such as space travel, computers, the internet?
• What does the meeting of interest groups from politics and the corporate world, who adopt and launch such ideas, look like?
• How is techno-optimism set in motion?
• How does the society react to the announcements and the realisation of technological innovations (propaganda), and how does it react to the actual changes brought about by the innovations?

The exhibition space offers two ratio-active triggers, one from 1954 and one from 2012:

1.
In 1954, FBI’s informer and one of the inspirers of McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt Walt Disney established collaboration with Werner von Braun, an SS officer and the author of V1 and V2 programmes. The partnership resulted in the propaganda film for the Futureworld area of the Disneyland theme park, and at the same time it also positioned the space programme as the symbolic centre of the Cold War.

2.
In December 2012, representatives from 190 countries will meet at the International Telecommunication Union Conference in Dubai and start the process of redefining the global regulatory frame for internet governance. Regimes with long-lasting and troubling histories of violation of human rights, such as the USA, Russia and China, will determine, inter alia, the operative definition of freedom, which will then serve as the basis for the new house regulations in our digital lives.

PAST FUTURE NOW at Aksioma | Project Space

The show has been produced with the kind collaboration of: