Major Exhibition : We Have Always Lived in the Future

March 24 – April 22nd

Opening Reception
7pm Friday, March 24

Gallery Hours
Saturday & Sunday, noon – 6pm

or by appointment, email thefuture@fluxfactory.org

Silicon Flux

March 30th, 7pm – The Raced and Gendered Environment

Shuang Li, Natasha Mmonatau
This panel will discuss cultural transmission across borders, femininity in nature and urban, and the work of looking.

April 6th, 7pm – Invisibility, Disability and Accessibility

Rosary Solimanto and Nancy Nowacek
Panel discussion on how technologies of the designed environment exclude certain bodies and the invisibility of disability.

Flux Thursday : April 13th, 7pm – Visions of the Future: AI and VR

Stephanie Dinkins, Nettrice Gaskins, LaJune McMillian
Discussion on how the narrow networks through which algorithms are tested limit these new technologies and the ability to access them.

April 20th, 7pm Wearables? Wearables.

Tamara Leacock
Is the presence of digital tech required for a garment to be smart? Looking beyond silicon-based hardware, we will discuss the different permutations of wearables.

We Have Always Lived in the Future is one of Flux Factory’s major 2017 exhibitions and is curated by Flux Artists-in-Residence, Joelle Fleurantin and Zeelie Brown.

We Have Always Lived in the Future is an exhibition and series of artist-led discussions called, Silicon Flux, centering marginalized groups who are ignored or erased from Silicon Valley’s visions of future technologies. We seek to engage the ways that ableism, white supremacy, misogyny, colonialism and other modes of discrimination operate within the supposed impartiality of this industry, culture, and lifestyle.

Silicon Valley, a complex, networked global enterprise stretching from university towns, to Shenzhen, to Wall Street, to venture capitalists in Marin County, to the emptied and gentrifying factories of Detroit is based upon what we view as a more subtle and vicious displacement of the program of Modern capitalism. It is neoliberalism’s dream: a racist, colonial world sheathed in the comfort of sun-lit advertising.

A world of capital fueled by vicious Coltan wars in the Congo fought by child soldiers; a world of the commodification of human emotion via social media, of mass surveillance, of electronic waste product sullying an already irate Earth. A world of violence and cruelty digitally whitewashed good.

We seek an intersectional technology. We seek to trace the lines of what we have lost from buying into the fallacy that technological advancement is inherently destructive. We seek to understand what can be saved, revived, and reinvigorated as we march forward. We seek to remove barriers wired into Silicon Valley’s conception of technology. We seek transparency in the ways that machine learning and digital networks shift, alter, and distort daily life. We seek technology as a force for civilization.

We refuse to be afraid. We refuse to be afraid of the destruction our current technologies have wrought. We refuse to be afraid of the dystopic myths that venture capital-ordained tech geniuses tell us are inevitable. We refuse to be afraid because we have always been here. We have always lived in the future.

– Joelle Fleurantin and Zeelie Brown

Participating Artists: