The future was the theme around which the 2017-2022 Biennale Warszawa program was built. At the time, it seemed to us that in a situation of multidimensional crisis, opening a conversation about the future is a prerequisite for creating progressive systemic alternatives. The changes that have been taking place in the world in recent years verify this assumption. As we embark on a new phase of activity, we are thinking about futures in the plural, taking into account the interdependence of multiple ecosystems and dimensions: environmental, climate, technological, geopolitical or social, and recognizing that these are not separate domains, but areas that influence and shape each other. Thinking about multiple possible futures, however, stems primarily from the conviction that the prevailing and dominant vision of the future, based on development and progress for many decades, is no longer obvious and convincing, and that political radicalization and segmentation of the public sphere, the unbridled development of technology and the emergence of new forms of power have exhausted the possibilities of creating a single common future.
The challenges of recent years, such as pandemic, climate crisis, broken supply chains, surveillance capitalism, data colonialism, migration (including climate migration), war in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, including cyber warfare, are bursting the framework of local political systems, not respecting national, regional or continental boundaries. At a time of growing conflicts and geopolitical tensions, in which technology plays a leading role giving birth to new forms of planetary violence, climate and economic migrations, the rise of the radical right (one of the reasons for which is algorithmic polarization), the emergence of new forms of authoritarianism (including the digital one), what is needed today is a reflection that, on the one hand, will allow us to see the planetary dimension of processes and phenomena, and on the other – connecting different localities – will let us produce new translocal relations and models of cooperation.
Plastiglomerate (a variant of which, generated with the help of artificial intelligence, illustrates the first issue of the magazine) is an increasingly common hybrid lump in nature formed from the union of contaminated minerals, dissolved plastics, and decomposed technological waste. But it is also an ideal metaphor for the new order that is emerging at the intersection of technology, capital and political power. By introducing chaos, making systemic disruptions, challenging previously existing rules and divisions, and combining distant elements into new configurations, this order produces new multicomponent structures and subjectivities. In the inaugural issue of _BW_Mag, we try to answer the questions: what is this order and what elements does it consist of, how does it function and what can it become in the future, and above all – how can systemic alternatives be created when the new order is making us fearful every day and at the same time offers a remedy in the form of tightening security policies. Infrastructure can play a key role in this effort (it is the silent hero of this issue of the magazine), thanks to which the created alternatives gain a material foothold.
