Predicting the End of the World
Playboy examines Fernando Montiel Klint’s vision of near-future dystopia
It’s our natural inclination as humans to improve ourselves. This was long understood as a practical effort, focused around advancing the systems and tools that support us. One would expect this solution-oriented ideology to hold under looming threats of climate change, exploitative capitalism and a mercurial president. But instead, faced with obstacles that seem so vast and impenetrable, we grow fatigued and slowly lose our autonomy. We use paper straws and take social media breaks, mild acts of quasi-resistance that hardly scour the surface.
It seems as if humanity is perennially teetering on the edge of apocalypse. But the current threat of the future differs from the idea of total annihilation that brought on Y2K hysteria or the specificity of nuclear anxiety in the ‘80s. The horror isn’t that the world is ending, it’s that we’re going to have to continue living in it. Visions of dystopia grapple with the “hyperobject,” a term coined by theorist Timothy Morton to describe a boundless force beyond comprehension. But while the future is vague and the threats are multifarious, the effects of technology have become crucial to the conversation.
Fernando Montiel Klint’s ongoing DISTOPIA photo series exaggerates our submission, set in a post-civilization near-future, a techno-dystopia. Beautiful humanoids stand in our place, carefully engineered for this new reality. They look ageless, cloaked in iridescent pinks and blues. Their eyes are pale and vacant, but their gaze reads intense and expectant. There’s a silver-haired woman, wielding chopsticks over plate of colorful pills. A cyborg wears a silver hooded rain jacket, exposing only its face. One portrait leaves the impression of a futuristic fashion pictorial. Its subject appears genderless with windswept blond hair and baby pink lips, wearing only a metallic choker and a computer chip planted in their bare chest.
Fernando Montiel Klint’s ongoing DISTOPIA photo series exaggerates our submission, set in a post-civilization near-future, a techno-dystopia. Beautiful humanoids stand in our place, carefully engineered for this new reality. They look ageless, cloaked in iridescent pinks and blues. Their eyes are pale and vacant, but their gaze reads intense and expectant. There’s a silver-haired woman, wielding chopsticks over plate of colorful pills. A cyborg wears a silver hooded rain jacket, exposing only its face. One portrait leaves the impression of a futuristic fashion pictorial. Its subject appears genderless with windswept blond hair and baby pink lips, wearing only a metallic choker and a computer chip planted in their bare chest.
Like Klint’s characters, surreal spaces and artifacts are grounded in foreign familiarity. The Mexican artist spent three years traveling through the US, Mexico, and the west coast of South America, photographing their arid landscapes and manipulating the images to produce his imagined reality. The result is space-like craters and mountainous terrain, vultures and solar radiation meters transformed into surveillance robots. What looks like an abandoned gas station encloses rows of glowing neon red walls. All of humanity’s digital data is stored inside this bank, he explains, guarded by security cameras.
“My interest is in the return to the origin of humanity,” Klint tells me. “I address the return to the past within the future, vestiges of what are present today but in the future will be ruins, as are now the great Mayan cities, Incas or big cities like Los Angeles, or Mexico City.”
“I believe that the landscape as a site of exploration and introspection, DISTOPIA is located at the ends of the earth, places where one is generally disconnected from the world, interconnection does not exist and that allows me to be at peace from the oversaturation of visual and audio that invades us every second. A pass through real dystopian places, full of fabrics in the middle of nowhere.”
DISTOPIA sees a future plagued by rabid optimization at the stake of organic life, a society where the tech giants have grown too big and powerful for us to dismantle. We are commodities, unquestioning apparatuses serving the entities that rob us of our privacy and individuality. By merging with our machines, as Klint demonstrates, we adopt their planned obsolescence, constantly requiring upgrades and replacements. But the photographs have an alluring sheen, the surface-level beauty that continues to guide and cushion our surrender.
“We live the change generated by the digital, global behaviors defined by communication platforms,” Klint continues. “Where we stop recognizing ourselves and getting to know each other organically.”
“My interest is in the return to the origin of humanity,” Klint tells me. “I address the return to the past within the future, vestiges of what are present today but in the future will be ruins, as are now the great Mayan cities, Incas or big cities like Los Angeles, or Mexico City.”
“I believe that the landscape as a site of exploration and introspection, DISTOPIA is located at the ends of the earth, places where one is generally disconnected from the world, interconnection does not exist and that allows me to be at peace from the oversaturation of visual and audio that invades us every second. A pass through real dystopian places, full of fabrics in the middle of nowhere.”
DISTOPIA sees a future plagued by rabid optimization at the stake of organic life, a society where the tech giants have grown too big and powerful for us to dismantle. We are commodities, unquestioning apparatuses serving the entities that rob us of our privacy and individuality. By merging with our machines, as Klint demonstrates, we adopt their planned obsolescence, constantly requiring upgrades and replacements. But the photographs have an alluring sheen, the surface-level beauty that continues to guide and cushion our surrender.
“We live the change generated by the digital, global behaviors defined by communication platforms,” Klint continues. “Where we stop recognizing ourselves and getting to know each other organically.”
The horror isn’t that the world is ending, it’s that we’re going to have to continue living in it.
German filmmaker Hito Steyerl imagines a similar tech tyranny, one that diminishes our personhood. In her 2013 short, How Not to be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, she illustrates a surveilled society where people are reduced to anonymous units, lost in a flurry of ubiquitous images. Steyerl questioned our role in an image-saturated world in a 2013 interview with Berlin Art Link: “How do people disappear in an age of total over-visibility?…Are people hidden by too many images?…Do they become images?”
The short film outlines strategies for disappearance, including “living in a gated community,” “being a disappeared person as an enemy of the state,” and being “a woman over 50.” This “lesson” plays over shots of architectural renderings of luxury living communities, occupied by computer-generated humans.
Much of contemporary dystopian discourse deals with image and our inability to look beyond it and assess larger issues. Our dependence on image plays into our obsessions— with modifying our brains and bodies, with the immediate gratification of mobile technology. Our sense of self hinges on our access to a privatized digital network, where we trade personal information and privacy for a boundless stream of information and entertainment.
The short film outlines strategies for disappearance, including “living in a gated community,” “being a disappeared person as an enemy of the state,” and being “a woman over 50.” This “lesson” plays over shots of architectural renderings of luxury living communities, occupied by computer-generated humans.
Much of contemporary dystopian discourse deals with image and our inability to look beyond it and assess larger issues. Our dependence on image plays into our obsessions— with modifying our brains and bodies, with the immediate gratification of mobile technology. Our sense of self hinges on our access to a privatized digital network, where we trade personal information and privacy for a boundless stream of information and entertainment.
American artist Doug Aitken conjured the engrossing anxiety of an online existence with his 2018 exhibition, New Era. It begins with a video of Martin Cooper, the American engineer who made the first public call on a cell phone back in 1973, reflecting on his experience with and the impact of the invention. Then, three projections of the same eleven-minute loop reflect around a mirrored, hexagonal space. Kaleidoscopic images flit out of sync, encouraging viewers to continually shift their attention. An early model Motorola phone multiplies alongside a birds-eye views of deserted landscapes and cloverleaf highways. Ominous electronic music builds to booming techno.
New Era is something like a modern continuation of Gretchen Bender’s multichannel video installations from the ‘80s and ‘90s. But, whereas Aitken aroused a state of anxiety and forced alertness, Bender induced screen fatigue. She sought to expose television’s seductive numbing and brainwashing capabilities by surrounding viewers with omnipresent monitors, flickering live and recorded footage, news segments, scripted shows, horror films, war movies, and commercials.
Bender signaled at mass communication disempowering its viewers, overwhelmed with content and ready to accept entertainment as truth. And our vulnerability has only increased with the pervasiveness of social media and the 24-hour news cycle. Her work was recently shown at Red Bull Arts in New York in an exhibit called So Much Deathless, named after the large-scale video project she was working on until her death in 2004.
New Era is something like a modern continuation of Gretchen Bender’s multichannel video installations from the ‘80s and ‘90s. But, whereas Aitken aroused a state of anxiety and forced alertness, Bender induced screen fatigue. She sought to expose television’s seductive numbing and brainwashing capabilities by surrounding viewers with omnipresent monitors, flickering live and recorded footage, news segments, scripted shows, horror films, war movies, and commercials.
Bender signaled at mass communication disempowering its viewers, overwhelmed with content and ready to accept entertainment as truth. And our vulnerability has only increased with the pervasiveness of social media and the 24-hour news cycle. Her work was recently shown at Red Bull Arts in New York in an exhibit called So Much Deathless, named after the large-scale video project she was working on until her death in 2004.
Jordan Wolfson suspects the content overload has given way to a toxic casualness regarding violence and its troubling proximity to pop culture within media. He tests his viewers’ threshold for graphic imagery, which he often dresses up with cartoon animation and pop songs.
His video work Riverboat Song (2017) begins with a boyish cartoon, who booty-pops to Iggy Azalea and drinks his own urine. “I’d like you to understand that I’m not responsible for my rage, but it is instead a response to your correctable defects,” the character says. Throughout the video, he takes the form of a crocodile, chain-smoking rats, and horses. It ends with a slideshow of YouTube clips, including real footage of a white man beating a black youth.
That same year, Wolfson showed his controversial VR piece, Real Violence (2017), at the Whitney Biennial. The 360-degree video simulation begins with a city street and the faint sound of Hanukkah blessings. Wolfson walks on screen and proceeds to bash in another white man’s head.
His video work Riverboat Song (2017) begins with a boyish cartoon, who booty-pops to Iggy Azalea and drinks his own urine. “I’d like you to understand that I’m not responsible for my rage, but it is instead a response to your correctable defects,” the character says. Throughout the video, he takes the form of a crocodile, chain-smoking rats, and horses. It ends with a slideshow of YouTube clips, including real footage of a white man beating a black youth.
That same year, Wolfson showed his controversial VR piece, Real Violence (2017), at the Whitney Biennial. The 360-degree video simulation begins with a city street and the faint sound of Hanukkah blessings. Wolfson walks on screen and proceeds to bash in another white man’s head.
Beijing-based painter Jia Aili’s apocalypse is more abstract. Lightning strikes cracked land and black holes. Figures emerge out of geometric rubble and industrial scraps. When you can make them out, his characters wear gas masks and hazmat suits. Combustion, his 2019 show at New York’s Gagosian, shows his work over ten years, an evolving hellscape.“Combustion in the general sense refers to the violent chemical reaction of luminescence and heat, and this process is also like the trajectory of individual consciousness,” Aili toldArtnet in a recent interview. “In the modern world, for an individual, the physical body became highly compatible with society, but the spirit gradually lost its sense of belonging.”
In the interview, Aili goes on to quote Heidegger’s Being and Time: “Things can show themselves only if we do not attempt to put them into the box of the ideas we make.” But perhaps a more efficient methodology for understanding our modern techno-dystopia can be found in the German philosopher’s 1954 work,The Question Concerning Technology. We are at the whim of modern technology, placed in standing-reserve, as Heidegger puts it. It enslaves and distracts us from “the call of a more primal truth.” But, through art, he argues, we can begin to re-orient ourselves.
In the interview, Aili goes on to quote Heidegger’s Being and Time: “Things can show themselves only if we do not attempt to put them into the box of the ideas we make.” But perhaps a more efficient methodology for understanding our modern techno-dystopia can be found in the German philosopher’s 1954 work,The Question Concerning Technology. We are at the whim of modern technology, placed in standing-reserve, as Heidegger puts it. It enslaves and distracts us from “the call of a more primal truth.” But, through art, he argues, we can begin to re-orient ourselves.
