Futurespeak: Shane Hope's Keywords Defined


Image: Shane Hope, Copylution, 2009


“Your Mom Is Open Source,” an exhibition of Hope’s work at Winkelman Gallery that opens Friday, features Mol Mods as well as the series “Compile-A-Child,” imagined school assignments by artificial kids (only the latter are reproduced here, because the Mol Mods lose too much when shrunk to bloggable dimensions). Hope’s art is a visual analogy to hard science fiction, a genre where authors base their narratives on projected technologies rather than transposing contemporary dramas to a fantasized, futuristic stage. For viewers poorly versed in hard sci-fi, the conceptual platform of Hope’s work can be opaque; the announcement for “Your Mom Is Open Source” concludes with a mystifying list of keywords, both of his own coinage and borrowed from the fields of his interest. Hope agreed to discuss some of them here.

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Image: Shane Hope, mehums are going, 2009

In an analogy to the breakdown of modern physics near a gravitational singularity, Vernor Vinge defined the Singularity as a theoretical future point which takes place during a period of accelerating change sometime after the creation of a superintelligence, an artificial brain more intelligent and creative than the human mind. Hard sci-fi authors, as well as professional forecasters, realized some two decades ago that nobody could realistically write about anything occurring past this Singularity. Far-flinging extrapolations could be flung no further. Simply put, they realized that we were inching toward inventing the next inventors and couldn't presume to imagine their imaginings. Futurological films and other envisionings became sort of mostly doomed to deploy dystopic dramatic drivel—a.k.a. disasterbation—because it's plainly more possible, however implausible, to picture a future having fallen into decay than having been sustainably built. An exponentially divergent Posthuman technocracy couldn't necessarily be pictured as a trompe-l'