Bahar Noorizadeh
After Scarcity
After Scarcity is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks Soviet cyberneticians (1950s – 1980s) in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. If history at its best is a blueprint for science fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable access to the future. Vindicating this other internet, the work presents the economic application of socialist cybernetic experiments as extraordinary to the financial arrangements and imaginations of our time. It addresses urgent issues such as broadband idealism, regulated networks of data, high-speed capitalism, and the urgency of time. Blurring the line between sci-fi and history, the work serves as both a reality check and a glimmer of hope, allowing us to consider a future that does not necessarily have to rely on speculation or an overemphasis on financialization.
Bahar Noorizadeh is filmmaker, writer, and platform designer. She works on the reformulation of hegemonic time narratives as they collapse in the face of speculation: philosophical, financial, legal, futural, etc. Noorizadeh is a founding member of BLOCC (Building Leverage over Creative Capitalism), a research and education platform that proposes pedagogy as a strategy to alter the relationship between Contemporary Art and urban renewal. Her current research examines the intersections of finance, Contemporary Art and emerging technology, building on the notion of “Weird Economies” to precipitate a cross-disciplinary approach to economic futurism and post-financialization imaginaries.
At a time when the discourse around capitalism, economies, financialization and neoliberalism is abundant but lacks serious depths into the complexities, history and potentials it holds, Noorizadeh’s practice maintains an important critical proposition that problematizes how we understand and think of these issues while simultaneously urging us to reconsider our position on them.