It doesn’t have a Shape, it has a Shadow
at Spor Klübü, Berlin March-April 2019
TC McCormack, Michelle Atherton and Jette Gejl
Most stories have a shape to them, well this story doesn’t have any shape, but it does have a shadow. We could try to describe the shadow (of it), but by the time we get to the end... the sun will have shifted position and the dimensions of the story’s shadow will be a geometric perversion of what they were at the start.
‘The biologist Stuart Kauffman speaks of what he calls the adjacent possible. This consists of “all those [entities] that are not members of the actual, but are one reaction step away from the actual.” Something is adjacently possible if it can be actualized in a single step: like a point mutation, or a chemical reaction leading to a new configuration of matter. ... Steven Johnson, amplifying Kauffman’s idea, describes the adjacent possible as “a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.... What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen.’1
This exhibition is conceived as a site of excavation. Michelle Atherton, Jette Gejl and TC McCormack have assembled a group of material gestures and phenomena that draw on our past imperfect to speculatively reach into a shadow future.
co-curated with Michelle Atherton and Jette Gejl
1. Unpredicting the Future (2018), by Steven Shaviro https://alienocene.com/2018/04/01/futurity-and-science-fiction/