Weathervane
Studio A, Goldsmiths, 2016
In 2007, Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated that Google’s future ambitions were “to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’” Such statements reveal an emerging cultural logic that goes well beyond prediction: an oracular mode of address aimed at precarious, decision-fatigued neoliberal subjects who, through a haze of possibilities, seek a “right” path to their future. The oracular address is highly personalized; yet it is also highly normative, pre-empting and prescribing what might constitute the best course of action. Can minor, idiosyncratic practices of prediction and prophecy – which speak to broader histories of divination – unsettle the dominant choice architectures of our time?
Through objects, gestures, a private wifi broadcast, painting, cutting, song, a screenshot and a roaming laser level line, Weathervane presents an album of scores, salves and scaffolds for the decision-making process. Almost-games, choreographed movements, chance procedures, small gestures and quite a few “bad” decisions speak to the desire to care for the future, to know the right path, to knit oneself into the known.
