Bahar Noorizadeh, After Scarcity
February 3–March 2, 2021
Join us on e-flux Video & Film: staff picks for a screening of Bahar Noorizadeh’s After Scarcity (2018), on view from Wednesday, February 3 through Tuesday, March 2, 2021.
After Scarcity
2018, 35 minutes
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.
Bahar Noorizadeh is a filmmaker, writer, and platform designer. Her current research examines the notion of “Weird Economies” to precipitate a transdisciplinary approach to economic futurism and post-financialization imaginaries. Her work has appeared in the Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program, DIS Art platform, Transmediale Festival, Berlinale Forum Expanded, and Geneva Biennale of Moving Images among others. Upcoming engagements include participation at the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennial 2020 and solo exhibition at Museum Folkwang, Essen. She is pursuing her work as a PhD candidate in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London where she holds a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.
About the program
e-flux Video & Film: staff picks is a monthly streaming program of staff picks and recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
