Liquidity, in today’s global network society, is a primary metaphor for an emerging ‘space of flows’, encompassing the accelerated movement of people, of global capital, of digital images and of information generally, now circulating around the planet. Sociologist, Manuel Castells coined the term ‘a space of flows’, in his book The Rise of the Network Society, as a way of understanding these new conditions, emerging from the all-pervasive flood of digital communications. With the acceleration of globalisation, the rapid developments of information technology and the relentless advance of neo-liberalism over the past twenty-five years, many disparate worlds have become interconnected and contemporaneous with each other. This multiplicity is characterised by massive demographic shifts, diaspora, labour migrations, rapid movements of global capital and speeded-up processes of cultural hybridization. Thus, ‘the contemporary’ could be said to refer to a worldwide situation, the most definitive characteristic of which is the experience of being immersed in a deluge of information, marked by an unprecedented diversity and depth of difference, by the coexistence of incommensurable viewpoints and by the absence of an all-encompassing narrative (such as modernity) that will enlist the participation of all. Within this confluence of multiple temporalities, many different currents compete for ascendency, but with no clear vison of the future. The flow of time has accelerated to such an extent that we seem to be locked in a perpetual present, described by Castells as a ‘timeless time’, in which ‘the space of flows [...] dissolves time, by disordering the sequence of events and making them simultaneous, thus installing society in an eternal ephemerality.’ Without a clear vision of the future or a shared belief in the continual transformation of society for the better, the question arises, how will the role of the artist function and change, drifting in the wake of utopian imaginaries - after the future?

Trondheim Academy of Fine Art is part of the Nowegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Art & Ocean is part of NTNU's strategic research area, Ocean.

Image: Liquidity Inc. Hito Steyerl (2015)