Weathervane

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.