THE FINAL PROPHET 最后的预言家
26 DEC 2020 - 26 JAN 2021 
| 策展人 CURATORS |
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| 邱志杰 QIU Zhijie 龙星如 Iris LONG |
| 艺术家 ARTISTS |
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| 谷口明彦/Akihiko Taniguchi,In_K,陈抱阳 CHEN Baoyang & 冰河科技,Studio Above&Below,邓碧文 DENG Biwen,Dogma Lab,Fragmentin,高扬 GAO Yang, Heather Dewey-Hagborg,Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Michael Frei & Mario von Rickenbach,邱创伟 QIU Chuangwei,邱思遥 QIU Siyao, 石伟力 SHI Weili, 施政 SHI Zheng,Studio Oleomingus,Tega Brain & Julian Oliver & Bengt Sjölén,王沂 WANG Yi & 李博 LI Bo,Yiyun Kang,曾理 ZENG Li & 叶上达 YE Shangda |
| 主办 ORGANIZER |
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| 深圳市南山区市委宣传部 Publicity Department of Nanshan District Committee, City of Shenzhen 中央美术学院实验艺术学院 School of Experimental Art, CAFA |
| 影像邀请单元 Special Screening Program: 策展 蔡星洋 Curation Cai Xingyang |
| 刘玗 LIU Yu,潘律 PAN Lv,彭祖强 PENG Zuqiang,苏杰浩 SU Jiehao, 苏郁心 SU Yuxin,Virginia Lee Montgomery, 王博 WANG Bo,郑源 ZHENG Yuan |
预言家的雇主是时空规律，但预言家失业了。 机械手表、石英钟、原子钟和深邃真空中的脉冲星，都因老化而不再稳定，查阅未来不再是预言家的特权。过去，预言家在窥测未来时，会监测到一重重此起彼伏的、影影绰绰的剪影，他选择看起来最清晰的那个，并通过细致入微的描述，让它更有可能成为人们所经历的真实。但近来预言家发现，未来不再是朦胧剪影，它甚至停止了涨落，而是变成一股股边界分明的河流，同时奔涌而来。
我们擅长形容已确然发生之事为“档案”， 尚未到来之事为“概率”。 已发生的一切是沉积的地壳，而潜在将发生的一切是熔融状态的岩浆。预言家有能力去叩击这个被称为未来的，黑体一般的空腔，检测里面的振动与辐射，以参天机。而预言家的雇主似乎放弃了这一游戏规则：从这一天开始， 空腔不再闭合，未来也变成了可以查阅的“无穷档案”。 预言家并不关心这一规则变动对人类到底有什么影响，他只是有些沮丧于人们不再依靠预测 便可以窥看古往今来最稀缺而昂贵的“天意”，这让他的职业失去了价值。自那场世纪隔离伊始，未来之雨的降落，不再依赖于少数人持有的感通或远古流传的仪轨，甚至不再依赖于人们一度笃信的海量 数据的运算、分类与预测。未来从“求雨”世代进入了“人工降雨”世代，就像马车被碾进历史一样， 预言成为了人类演化进程中最后一件被淘汰的科技。 人们用数百年的时间，用火车、超音速飞机、卫星、 广播、电视和互联网淘汰了物理距离，他们进而淘汰了时间⸺或者说，时间的错觉。
赋闲的预言家乐于观察人们查阅未来时狂喜抑或惊恐的表情。就像游戏地图瞬间被全部照亮， 光滑、奇异的造物像冰川般在空气中缓缓移动，掠过街头，闪过眼角。在某一个未来里，所有的人成为了一模一样的“平均人”， 预言家时而津津有味地看着一个女人与基因报告相恋，样貌、出身、经历乃至肉身早已无关紧要。 望远镜里，用地球的数据复刻出的火星副本诡谲地闪烁。而未知大陆的山巅极寒降临，自然倒袭，人们扛着种种曾经被奉为至宝的科技文物，如祖先一般在深雪中跋涉与呢喃。繁衍、毁灭、荣光、阴霾、集群、割裂、沸腾、静虚……这些彼此矛盾的状态，同时成为了真命题。
希尔伯特在谈到“无限大之数”时，曾想象过一个有无穷个房间的旅馆，有无数位客人等着入住。恒河沙数的未来如同取之不尽的丰饶资源，这无选择、无差别的、无穷大的未来矩阵给所有人带来的另一个难题在于：在过去，人们来找预言家，问的多是该如何选择才会给自己带来更好的命运。而现在，人们发现虽然未来可以一览无余，但偏偏里面没有自己。尽管所有人都可以查阅所有比邻时空，但人们依然不知道哪一种才会是自己即将亲身经历的唯一明日。
“这种预言能力，听起来也没什么意思啊。” 失业的预言家喝得醉醺醺，自言自语道。
“你知道你为何最初被允许成为预言家吗？”雇主的声音在梦里传来：“你曾允诺，对每个提问者感同身受，这才能把未来从你的眼睛里传递去。毕竟，你看到的那些未来影像里，也从来没有你自己。”
不知预言家在醉里是否会了意。每个人看见的未来档案，都是所有其他人未来的总和。而他们自己将要经历的版本，则隐藏在无穷多他者的眼里。命运需要所有人和所有人交换眼睛，而这个新世界需要的不再是“如何知道更多”，而是“如何共同选择”。
(备注：以上所有“未来”的画面描述，均来自参展作品。）
The prophet was employed by the rules of timespace, but the prophet is now unemployed.
Mechanic wristwatches, quartz clocks, atomic clocks and pulsars in the depth of vacuum are all destabilized by their old age, and referencing the future is no longer the prerogative of the prophet. In the past, when the prophet tried to get a glimpse of the future, he would pick up throngs of incessant, nebulous vignettes. He would pick whichever seemed to him the most defined, and by way of detailed descriptions, made it more likely to become the lived reality. Recently, however, the prophet has discovered that the future is no longer a series of nebulous vignettes. It has ceased all the ebb and flow. Instead it disintegrates into clearly defined streams that charge at you at once.
We are good at describing what has happened as a ‘dossier’, and what is yet to come as ‘probability’. Everything that has happened is the sedimentary crust, and what is latently to come is the molten lava. The prophet is capable of knocking on the dark matter like hollow that is also called ‘the future’ to examine the vibrations and radiations, in an attempt to apprehend the cosmological secrets. Yet the prophet’s employer seems to have given up on the rules of the game. From now on, the hollow does not close any more, and the future has become an accessible ‘infinite dossier’.
The prophet does not care what impact this change of rules will have on the humanity. He is but a bit frustrated that man is privy to the historically scarce and expensive ‘destiny’ without resorting to prophecy, which has diminished the intrinsic value of his profession. Since that century of insulation and the precipitation of the future, we no longer rely on the telepathy of the few or the ancient rituals. We even stop relying on the computation, cataloguing and prediction of a sea of data, once the bedrock of conviction. The future has evolved from an era of ‘rainmaking’ to an era of ‘cloud seeding’. In the same way the horse-drawn carriage has been run over into history, prophecy has become the most recent technology in the chain of human evolution that has been rendered obsolete. It takes the humanity just a couple of centuries to phase out physical distance with the introduction of trains, supersonic jets, satellites, radio and television broadcasting, and the internet. The humanity has gone one step further by phasing out time itself, or rather, the illusion of time.
The unemployed prophet takes delight in observing the ecstatic or fearful expressions of man looking up the future, as if the game map were lit all of a sudden, with sleek and strange creatures moving slowly in the air like glaciers, past the corners of the streets and eyes. In a certain future, all men have become ‘the average person’. The prophet sometimes look tantalizingly at a woman and fall in love with a genetic report. Looks, upbringing, experience, or even the flesh isn’t of any concern anymore. Through the telescope, the duplicate of Mars based on the data of the Earth glimmers like a paradox. Yet an extreme cold has descended on top of the unknown continent, as Nature struck back. Man carries many technological artefacts that were once treasured, wading through deep snow, murmuring, just like their ancestors. Reproduction, extinction, glory, haze, collectives, fracturing, boiling, tranquillity….All these contradictory states are at once true propositions.
When the mathematician David Hilbert talks about the ‘infinity’, he posits a hypothetical hotel with a countably infinite number or rooms waiting to be filled by an infinite number of guests. The future of the countless sands of the Ganges is an inexhaustible resource. The indiscriminating, identical and infinite matrix of the future raises another difficulty for everyone: in the past, man consulted the prophet for better choices that may lead to a better fortune. Now, man has discovered that the future can be seen through, yet he himself is missing in that future. Although everyone can also look up all the time-spaces in their proximity, man still does not know for certain which is going to be the one and only tomorrow they get to experience first hand.
‘Such capacity for prophecy does not sound interesting’, murmured the drunken, unemployed prophet to himself.
‘Do you know why you were allowed to become a prophet in the first place?’ says the voice of the employer in the dream, ‘ you have promised that you will empathise with every person that raises a question, so that you could communicate the future through your eyes. After all, you yourself was never present in the images of the future you saw.’
We don’t know if the prophet got it in his drunkenness. The future dossier that everyone sees is the sum total of the future of everyone else. The version they are going to experience is hidden in the eyes of the infinite others. Destiny requires that everyone and everyone else exchange their eyes, and the new world needs to know ‘how to make a collective choice’ rather than ‘how to know more’.
(Note: All the graphic descriptions of the ‘future’ are drawn from the exhibited works at ‘the Final Prophet’)
