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After Scarcity

Bahar Noorizadeh

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Bahar Noorizadeh, After Scarcity (still), 2018.

Staff picks After Scarcity
Bahar Noorizadeh
2018

35 Minutes

Staff Picks

Date
February 3–March 2, 2021

WARNING: This video contains photosensitive content

Join us on e-flux Video & Film for a screening of Bahar Noorizadeh’s After Scarcity (2018), on view from Wednesday, February 3 through Tuesday, March 2, 2021. The film is presented as part of the monthly series Staff picks.

In the Soviet Union of the 1960s, some technologists saw computers as machines of communism and cybernetics as an answer to the difficulties of a waning centrally planned economy. After Scarcity is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks these Soviet cyberneticians in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. If history at its best is a blueprint for science-fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable an access to the future.

How might we use computation to get us out of our current state of digital feudalism and towards new possible utopias? 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.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Category
Communism, Economy, Technology
Subject
Video Art, Cybernetics, Soviet Union, Money & Finance, Futures, Science Fiction
Return to Staff Picks

Bahar Noorizadeh is an artist, writer and filmmaker. She is the founder and editor of Weird Economies, a platform that looks at the relationship between art and capitalism. Noorizadeh is currently an associate lecturer at RCA School of Architecture and the Design Academy Eindhoven.

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