Gallery 2 Exhibition Schedule

Anti-Spacesuit - The Dirty Future
August 23 - September 25, 2003
Gallery 2, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
847 West Jackson Boulevard, 312.563.5162

"I find myself missing systems, softwares, tools, and products before they are even gone. I miss them because I know that the ever-redoubling speed of digital technologies will render them obsolete in the blink of my too human eye. Only nostalgia for the future allows me the mental space to confront the convergence of digital technologies and cultural production."

- Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to grid: a user's guide to digital arts, media and culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.

The dirty future is the logical progression of now, a bittersweet celebration of the continuing joys and terrors of the everyday. Inasmuch as history is relative and change happens incrementally, Anti-Spacesuit proposes a future that is in stark opposition to the utopic visions of shiny cybernetic worlds and/or cleansing global apocalypses that sci-fi fans and cyber-geniuses have heralded for decades.

In its place, Anti-Spacesuit offers a world of the nostalgic future - one that is rooted in our collective memory of what could have been (and might still be). Populated by Max Headroom, analog synthesizers, boxy cardboard robots, Japanese space dinosaurs, and the promise of rayon, the dirty future recognizes our own status as makeshift cyborgs; we are the technology that we create, and the rapid growth of internet and information systems has already pushed our interactions into the realm of the virtual and posthuman.

Our postmodern world of the right now may come equipped with cellular hand-held organizers, virtual reality glasses and commercial-skipping TV, but where are our flying cars? Our robot armies? We can genetically modify plants and produce super weeds, but we still have to take a gas-burning bus to get groceries. We still sneeze from the common cold, we still cry when our hearts get broken, and we still donít know if UFOs are real.
Anti-Spacesuit is the (un)certain solution - it is the possibility of now, the awkward embrace of tomorrow, the dirty future of the forever and ever and ever.

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Related Events:

In its dual incarnation as both a gallery show and a film/video screening, "Anti-Spacesuit - The Dirty Future" is an interrogation into the dystopic/ low tech/ nostalgic visions of the future that are already in cultural production. Over 40 artists are collectively represented in the two parts, and their work runs the gambit from comic arts to painting to photography to installation to fashion to video to 16mm film.

• The "Anti-Spacesuit - The Dirty Future" gallery show runs at G2 from August 23 to September 25, 2003, with an opening on August 29, 2003, from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
  
  
• The "Anti-Spacesuit - The Dirty Future" screening will screen one time only at 8:00 on September 4, 2003 at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

Admission to all time arts events is free and open to the public. Please call 312.443-3703 to confirm programming information.