The open call has closed for the year 2021!
The first annual project reviews are now ready and available at the new websites https://expo2121.org / https://twentyone-twentyone.link/
Welcome back another year for a new open call!
Open call 2121 for works to a future audience in hundred years.
This is an open invitation to the year 2121. It is aimed at artists, technologists, researchers and people in general to contribute with ideas, input, measures, work, or project that could be of interest to a future audience.
The contributions will not be published until 2121.
On a yearly basis the works will be discussed in panel by a curator group on a public forum.
The open call is sent out annually with varying wording and perspective to not cement the context as we want different groups to contribute.
The invitation is also addressed to robots and machines.
In 2121 none of us are here. Given the time frame people are encouraged to think long-term since there is no short-term gain nor any retroactive force with a time span larger than life. The frame can help us reflect on what we are now, somehow back from the future. Perhaps the most important thing here is the requirement to look beyond oneself - this part of the process is thus reset. In relation to 2121, there are no self-reinforcing incentives, no money, nothing to look forward to, nothing to show off.
Annual discussion
A group of curators reviews the contributions each year and discusses them in a panel in a public forum. These are documented for posterity and are widely available. The curation group changes on a regular basis (members can appoint successors). So with the yearly discussions the project is not completely hermetically sealed, something seeps out, even from black holes.
Expo 2121
How to ensure that the expo will take place in 2121: With inherited contracts, the festival may be an NFT or a project that owns itself, empty. so that it itself can make sure to be completed by transferring to interested, ref. the sculpture which always sells itself on ebay. Or something much more informal, contracts written on napkins or in a comment on a forum. Blockchain technology makes such ephemeral ownership public and formal.
Dead media
The technology for how the project documents itself will also be changing. What we know as www and URLs are already being undermined. The man who invented the URL wanted to call it the Universal Resource Locater, others later saw megalomania and changed the name to mean Uniform Resource Locater. We can not rely on the URL protocols but only use them as temporary resource holders. The contributions to 2121 will be certified with blockchain technology, if nothing else for historical reasons. In this way it can be proven, given that the blockchain is still around, that the contributions exist without having to show them. These will be numbered sequentially and stored in a database. Since the contributions are for 2121, they should contain sufficient metadata, ie how to read and understand them, both formally, technically and in a context that can, and will, have been lost over the years. one. Metadata and context become as important as the content data itself. The database will have to migrate to other technologies as time goes on, as the project itself will undergo changes through the questions it asks.
It's... the future
According to technology giants, two developments over the next 25 years will further revolutionize our world: artificial intelligence and quantum computers. The climate crisis is something you naturally think about, related to industrialization, globalization and technology. Artificial intelligence is another area that assumes threatening views if one sees far enough. Biotechnology is also something that will change us as human beings, directly and literally (AGTC). Since we can not look very far into the future, and increasingly shorter as development is accelerated, the questions we ask will be just as important than any answer that can be given. In that sense the open call can be likened to a game about changing rules and breaking them.
Future research often states
Some themes that often pop up in addition to AI and QM are virtuality, multiverse, neuroscience, robotics, human vs non-human, bio art, space, climate, etc. We are at an important turning point in history, humans are globally intertwined, reinforced by machines, and we have access to more knowledge than ever before. This makes a collective self-awareness of the future no less important. What we imagine also has a self-fulfilling effect. The questions we ask already contain some of the answers we seek, while at the same time the more we know the greater the unknown fringe zone becomes.
The project is a thought experiment and a reflection more than anything else, on the human conditions and when looking beyond oneself.
What would be interesting for an audience in 2121? Would they rather look back to those who looked forward to them again? How does it involve the present? What is to be communicated - the human witness, the truth? Is it reasonable to assume that truth is the most durable, that which will have value beyond ourselves? It means of course not only objective scientific truth or facts, but human, experienced truth, simple and sincere, things we'd rather like to postpone to and project into the future or cover over from the past. We're interested in what happens when this elastic breaks.
We can build what the Germans used to call a "Giftschrank", a poison cabinet that contains dangerous ideas and works that should still be preserved and available under certain circumstances.
Within the concept we can also imagine the development of a "theoretical artist" in the direction of how a theoretical physicist works, one who does not create art but rather thought experiments with possible art based on facts. It remains to be seen how far the analogy can be drawn. As science reveals more and more counter-intuitive aspects of reality, theorists are increasingly fumbling with possible interpretations of how the world is screwed together. Fashion, faith and imagination play a bigger role in theoretical physics than one might think. But as Roger Penrose says, "Yet we see that there are important aspects of nature to our universe that are so extraordinarily strange (but not always fully recognized as such) that if we do not indulge in what may appear to be scandalous fantasies, we will have no chance of agreeing on what may well be an extraordinary, seemingly fantastic, underlying truth." We like to think that science reveals more and more of the world, that our knowledge is constantly increasing, but then it is also the case that the more we know, the larger the unknown area outside. Uncovering the quantum world was thus a real setback in knowledge, suddenly we knew nothing about the world! Art and science find meeting points since we believe what we see and since we see what we believe.
Let's say that we want interesting contributions. What results are desirable, which are interesting? What might seem interesting today might not be interesting in only a few years. An open call for 2121 is an impossible undertaking in terms of goal and result. The best we can hope for is that the results arouse interest. What would make something interesting in hundred years? The answers might surprise us, the questions even more.
Dissemination
The 2014 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Stefan Hell, during his banquet speech, recalled what Nobel Prize winner Erwin Schrödinger from 1933 said: "It is fair to say that we will not experiment with individual particles more than we will raise dinosaurs in the zoo. " Hell, who spoke eighty years after Schrödinger's comment, said: "Well, ladies and gentlemen, what can we learn from this? First. Erwin Schrödinger would never have written Jurassic Park ... Secondly, as a Nobel Prize winner you should say "this or that will never happen", because then you will significantly increase your chances of being remembered decades later in a similar speech."
Open call 2121 will run yearly hopefully until 2121. The project is small but might get some attention as time goes on and how things spread and are made known without resorting to campaigns. The time span means that such a strategy can be useful allthough low-key.
The dissemination of the projects should be able to draw attention to speculative, if not spectacular, aspects of reality through the counter-intuitive but well-known concept of time travel. If it can make people wonder a little and desire to know more about what nature and reality are, then much of the goal has been achieved. The more we find out about the world the more it is to find out. Suddenly completely new landscapes are revealed. A reality orientation today has the character of being a journey of discovery. He who is not amazed has not understood anything. At the same time, we are conscious of body and mind as lived life, our common phenomenology, how things appear to us, a focal point of all actual, possible and impossible realities.
The alternation between a subjective and objective perspective is something we emphasize and want to convey to an audience, through both disregarding oneself, and taking as a starting point our own experience. The leap between the inner and the outer, inconsistencies that seem to be reflected far into science, such as the problems surrounding the subject's status in observations.
This project is something my parents might understand. A project that looks a hundred years ahead. The concept can be conveyed quite easily. Open call 2121 is also suitable for giving all kinds of responses, from immediate to reflective.
The open call 2121 will foster transparency and inclusion.
The annual panel discussion of the contributions is disseminated online on open channels where the public can participate.