ALAN DÍAZ ALVA
Between Two Clocks: From Blank Futurism to the Aesthetics of Nonsynchronicity
The paper analyses the historical temporality of the contemporary tech-sector-adjacent futurology known today as longtermism. I argue that the latter offers a paradigmatic example of what Gary Wilder calls "blank futurism": an abstract, homogenised forward-looking temporality, deeply entangled with new apocalyptic and secularised eschatological narratives gathered under the notion of "existential risk." I will take the 'Clock of the Long Now' (a device currently under construction in Jeff Bezos' ranch) as a striking materialisation of this temporal imaginary, one that extrapolates the hegemonic clock-time of modernity, and with it the temporal regime of capital accumulation, into the farthest imaginable future. I juxtapose this clock with Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), a 24-hour montage film which, while being synchronised to clock-time, it aesthetically stages it in a way that ultimately eschews temporal homogeneity and reintroduces the untimely in Ernst Bloch’s sense of nonsynchronicity. Finally, I explore the political potentials of the untimely, not only as a source for radical futurity but also as fertile ground for reactionary fantasies.