The Future Doesn’t Need You | Soundwalk Collective, Jim Jarmusch

It begins as a live performance, whose feedback then feeds into a multichannel sound, light, and video installation on level -1 of Onassis Stegi, where the work premieres. The project is accompanied by a film program selected by Jarmusch.

It begins as a live performance, whose feedback then feeds into a multichannel sound, light, and video installation aOnassis Stegi, where the work premieres. The project is accompanied by a film program selected by Jarmusch.alls; voices and field recordings circle the listener with no fixed point of address; and visitors, filmed in real time, are folded into the image.

Sound processors continuously reshape this material as it plays, so that nothing in the room settles or resolves. Theresa Baumgartner’s light moves at its own, slower pace, wearing away the edges of the space until it becomes hard to tell where the room ends. An invisible landscape.

The future doesn’t need us. Every prophecy is both an act of aggression against what has yet to happen and a survival strategy: a way of feeling safe in the face of what we cannot control. Yet a prophecy, like any signal, cannot be stopped once it has been sent—you can’t stop the signal. This work is not, in the end, a response to extinction, but a way of inhabiting it as a possible transformation.

Entropy is the one certainty here. The other is a condition: whatever holds us together also keeps the collaborators dependent on one another, even as everything else comes apart.