All of Your Base

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In their space race the gurus of the NewSpace movement are expanding an imaginary that hybridizes individualism, libertarianism, neoliberal economics, counterculture and utopianism. “Why I Want to Fuck Elon Musk” plays with these cultural references, taking inspiration from the most emblematic statements spoken or tweeted by Elon Musk in recent years. Daniel Rourke, a London-based writer, artist and academic, has resorted to working with the OpenAI Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) language model to imagine and narrate chronicles from a near future in which blockchains have materialized and the deepfakes of Bezos and Musk have colonized Mars. The fictional universe thus created by human and non-human imagination builds a literary counterpart to IOCOSE’s latest works – the video animations Pointing at a New Planet (2020) and Free from History (2021) – presented on the occasion of the “All of Your Base” exhibition at Aksioma | Project Space in Ljubljana.

Artist Talk: Lip-synched Stardust

The NewSpace movement produces immense economic, technological and discursive investments towards the private colonization of extra-terrestrial planets. The most involved and visible actors are Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), but there is an ever-growing number of related investment funds, technology consultants and start-ups, based for the most part in Silicon Valley. The movement opens up numerous questions related to the privatization of extra-terrestrial space and on the conditions of possibility of imaginaries linked to the future of humankind. NewSpace, as a concept, appears as a technological solution for a limited few, unlikely to be implemented within our life span, but capable of moving enormous capital in the very short term. IOCOSE explores the utopian promises surrounding the NewSpace movement and their inevitable failure, and asks what could be done with the traces left on our planet of this adventurous project.