Cette publication consacrée aux films d'Anton Vidokle rassemble des essais et des conversations de théoriciens, de commissaires d'exposition et d'artistes qui explorent les thèmes de l'immortalité technologique et de la résurrection à la lumière de la philosophie cosmiste.
Citizens of the Cosmos examines the artist Anton Vidokle's films and the Cosmist philosophy underpinning them. It features essays and conversations with Vidokle by seminal contemporary theorists, curators, and artists: Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Raqs Media Collective. This is the first book to survey Vidokle's Cosmism-related filmic output, begun in 2014, and includes full scripts from the films.
The book's contributors speculate on Vidokle's Cosmist conceptions of technological immortality, utopian resurrection, museology, and space travel, grappling with how these ideas embroil or crystallize contemporary theories, practices, and technologies: atmospheric manipulation, cryonics, biopolitics, extraplanetary prospecting, geo-engineering, transhumanism, genetics.
Franco "Bifo" Berardi disagrees with the Cosmist conjecture of death as a flaw in the conception of the human being. Elizabeth Povinelli digests the life-nonlife mattering of dust through relationships to and from the human and more-than-human ancestors to come.
Boris Groys contemplates the gravitational forces between Cosmism and communism according to cosmic and social orders, grounded as they are in the laws of both physics and socialist politics. Keti Chukhrov considers the formation of thinking through madness, dying, and reasoning according to Cosmist philosophical and religious debates and beliefs.
Raqs Media Collective and Anton Vidokle discuss different cultures of death, finitude, and rituals. Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins examine the in-betweeness of the categories of life and death through the designs of terraforming vehicles navigating interplanetary space travel.
Daniel Muzyczuk investigates Vidokle's interests in the context of the history of the collection at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, while Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle converse about filmmaking references and methods, from voiceover narrative to editing processes.
« In light of the drastically shifting scales of the political, how can we envision the emerging shape of cosmopolitics? Citizens of the Cosmos is an inspiring collective exercise in such imagining, unafraid to turn to the very old—the ancestral, the long-dead, the half-forgotten, the ashes and dust—to reach out to the future of cosmopolitical existence. » Michael Marder
« Anton Vidokle has invented a new means of transport for the cosmists' ideas, one that somehow presents both the trees and the forest clearly. »
Molly Nesbit
Anton Vidokle (né à Moscou, vit à New-York et Berlin) est artiste et co-fondateur d'e-flux (www.e-flux.com), un réseau international qui comprend un site internet dédié à la création contemporaine, un système d'annonces électroniques et de transmission de savoir sur l'art, une vidéothèque (e-flux video rental) et un lieu (Unitednationsplaza à Berlin), à la fois école et espace d'exposition collaboratif. Vidokle est également à l'origine du projet Martha Rosler Library.
Son travail artistique a été montré dans d'importantes expositions internationales, à la Biennale de Venise ou à la Tate Modern de Londres.
