Futurisms Beyond Western Cultural Imaginaries
Chapter
Author(s) / editor(s):
Sushma Griffin
Year: 2025
Abstract:
This chapter explores the futuristic aesthetics of Lisa Reihana’s Groundloop (2022) and Lawrence Lek’s Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) (2016), examining how these video essays draw from earlier optical technologies—for Reihana photography and the panorama, and for Lek, cinema and montage—countering western anticipations of a dystopian posthumanism. Although Lek considers, with some irony, the evolution of Chinese cultural tropes by enfolding notions of “Computing, Copying, Gaming, Studying, Addiction, Labour and Gambling” in his dialectical questioning across western and Chinese assumptions, his fragmentary and layered visual and sonic narratives turn in on themselves to highlight the potential of the Chinese technological Other. Alternately, Reihana vitalizes the Māori proverb “Ka mua, ka muri” (walking backwards, into the future) in her creative reimagining of historic First Nations and Māori corroborations, visualizing ancient maritime voyages between Gadigal country and Aotearoa through the cinematic animation and video effects of Groundloop. The ambivalent aesthetic possibilities of Lek’s and Reihana’s futurisms incorporate a blending of past and future that imagines the present otherwise, thinking of alternative presents that, potentially, could already exist and are yet to be realized.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111316857-041
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