Future?

I've been thinking alot about the future. Firstly through my writing; currently an essay on Turner Prize nominees The Otolith Group. The future in this essay is a hypothetical one, one that is always in the future, always just beyond our reach. Yet in a complicated turn this is a hypothetical future brought to bear on the present. Cool. Secondly a future, less hypothetical, my own. Less cool.

The Otolith trilogy is really quite inspirational, quoting, appropriating, mixing a culture which doesn't fit or doesn't quite work into one that does. A future in which images are not consumed dumb but thought about, chewed over and spat out.

The future, my future, could follow in these positive footsteps. Yet the work of the Otolith Group is in response to their unhappiness in the present moment of each film's production. Kodwo Eshun talks about the difficulty of bringing an image into a world already over-saturated; it seems that his reasoning for creation is only within a climate of need, of want, of desperation. Creation is positive in response to a dirth.

(Creation or production? A question for another time.)

So in these times of economic strife, where it seems unlikely that my future will be anything but plain sailing I feel a little bit excited. Opportunities for creation and individuality spring up when the big institutions come under pressure. People have to go elsewhere, either they create in new and exciting ways propelling the bounds and casting them aside in order to exist or they drift into another place and forget. I see neither as a negative option.

Lets hope for creativity, more ambitious writing, more interesting exhibitions which occupy the empty space created by this cultural, social and economic dirth.

See 'hither and thither' on tether television for curator's testimonies from artist-led spaces across the country.