X-CENTRIC FUTURES :: Bahar Noorizadeh

How might we use computation to get us out of our current state of digital feudalism and towards new possible utopias? After Scarcity (31 min. 2018) is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks Soviet cyberneticians in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. Flying through swarms of floating dots outlining monasteries and city streets, After Scarcity flashes through decades of history to propose the ways contingent pasts can make fictive futures realer, showing us that digital socialism was inbred into the communist revolution and that computation doesn’t mean we’re condemned to today’s tyranny of total financialization.

After Scarcity will be preceded by The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism (13 min., 2021) a 13 min. video installation that revisits proposals for a communist sprawl in the Soviet Union of 1929.

Followed by a live discussion with the filmmaker (moderated by Erik Bordeleau)

X-Centric Futures inserts into the programming vector We would like to add and is organized by Giovanbattista Tusa and Bartholomew Ryan in conjunction with CultureLab of the Instituto de Filosofia da Nova and Centro Cultural Carpintarias de São Lázaro.


BIOGRAPHY

Bahar Noorizadeh is an artist, writer and filmmaker. Her research examines the historical advance of speculative activity and its derivative politics in art, urban life, and finance and philosophy. Noorizadeh is the founder of Weird Economies, an online art platform that traces economic imaginaries extraordinary to financial arrangements of our time. Her work has appeared at the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennial 2021, Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program, Transmediale Festival, DIS Art platform, Berlinale Forum Expanded, and Geneva Biennale of Moving Images among others. Noorizadeh has contributed essays to e-flux Architecture, Journal of Visual Culture, and forthcoming anthologies from Duke University Press and Sternberg Press. She is pursuing her work as a PhD candidate in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London where she holds a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.