Future Continuous: Present Stream

Future Continuous: Present Stream is an online series of episodes featuring contemporary artists and scholars responding to the shifting necessities of our moment. This series was developed with LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) and partnering organization JOAN Los Angeles. Future Continuous: Present Stream is created by Daniel R. Small and produced by David Matorin.

Focused primarily on artists working with research-based methodologies, Present Stream activates their inquiries by intermingling speculative works of art with discoveries and analysis from a diverse selection of invited scholars and experts in fields including neurobiology, physics, robotics, and urban history.

Present Stream is a documentary series that presents new and innovative forms of knowledge production that foreground the primacy of adaptability in recent contemporary art. The themes of each segment will continuously circle back to questions related to the limits, boundaries and pursuits entailed by operating under the umbrella term, “artist.” It will seek to interrogate which definitions of the term still hold true and which appear vestigial in our shifting present. Future Continuous will explore parallel and competing visions of what the future holds for both art and the world it lives in. In presenting both hopeful examples of progress and neglected signs of change, Future Continuous: Present Stream will strive to map our real evolving futures.

Episode 1: Viral Memory

Episode 1 of Future Continuous: Present Stream includes interviews with writer, urbanist, and media historian Norman M. Klein, artists Miljohn Ruperto and Candice Lin, and neurobiologist Jason Shepherd. By considering current upheavals through the lens of science fiction such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888), the episode’s prologue considers the future of downtown Los Angeles’s Bradbury Building by way of its history. “Viral Memory” then examines speculations around an ancient virus linked to memory in the brain’s genetic structure, the sibling relationship between infection and possession, and our estrangement from the intimacy of other species that share our bodies. Video works excerpted in Episode 1 include Ordinal SW/NE (2017) by Miljohn Ruperto and Rini Yun Keagy and Toxic Semiotics (2020) by Candice Lin.

Daniel R. Small (b.1984 in Centralia, Illinois, USA; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University. Small is an artist, anthropologist, and educator. Recent exhibitions include the traveling exhibition “Never Spoken Again” organized by Independent Curators International which will travel for the next five years. “The Conspiracy Of Art: Part II,” Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2019), “74 million million million tons,” SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York (2018); “Seeing Eye Awareness,” Museum of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2018); “Mad Horizon,” Index- The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden (2017); “Concrete Island,” VENUS LA, Los Angeles (2017), “The Hierophant,” Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest, Romania (2017); “Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only,” Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); “13th Biennale de Lyon,” Musee d’Art Contemporain Lyon, France (2015); “The Historical Society of Desert Archives,” The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, Utah (2015); “Bloody Red Sun of Fantastic L.A.,” PIASA, Paris, France (2015); “The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project,” Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) (2015). He received the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award in 2015 and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award in 2016.

David Matorin is an award-winning writer, documentarian and arts journalist based in Los Angeles. His projects for outlets including Arte, Thomson Reuters, The Intercept/Field of Vision and Janus Films have garnered Webby, Oscar and Independent Spirit awards and nominations. His writing for publications such as Art in America, WSJ, Flash Art, Bomb Magazine and Truthdig have earned him accolades from the Los Angeles Press Club. He has worked with foundations and non-profits including The James Irvine Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and The Southern Poverty Law Center. Previously based in New York City, his work is focused on the moving image in culture. He teaches at USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism.

Norman M. Klein is a critic, urban and media historian, and novelist. His books include: The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory; Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon; The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects; Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales; and the database novel Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-86. He is currently completing an interactive historical science fiction novel titled The Imaginary Twentieth Century. His essays have appeared in anthologies, museum catalogs, newspapers, scholarly journals, and on the web. They are symptoms of a polymath’s career, ranging from European cultural history to animation and architectural studies, from special effects to cinema and digital theory, to LA studies, fiction, media design and documentary film. His work (including museum shows) has centered on the relationship between collective memory and power in urban spaces; the thin line between fact and fiction; and erasure, forgetting, scripted spaces, and the social imaginary.

Miljohn Ruperto (b.1971 Manila, Philippines) lives and works in Los Angeles, USA Ruperto mainly works with video, film, photography, and performance to map the conditions that bring about our conception of nature and history: e.g. historiography, the history of nature, and the nature of nature. Recent shows include the 2019 Singapore Biennial, Singapore, The Second Industrial Art Biennial, Croatia (2018); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2018); and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018).

Jason Shepherd is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and holds the Jon M. Huntsman Presidential Chair at the University of Utah. He obtained his BSc (Hons) at the University of Otago in New Zealand, his Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the recipient of the Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award in Neuroscience, the International Society for Neurochemistry Young Investigator Award, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration Award, the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, and is a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow.

Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. She addresses themes of race, gender and sexuality in relationship to material histories of colonialism, slavery, and diaspora. Lin has had recent solo exhibitions at the Pitzer Galleries, Claremont, CA; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Art Center, Canada; Ludlow 38, New York; Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles; the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago; Portikus, Frankfurt; Bétonsalon, Paris; and Gasworks, London, as well as group exhibitions and biennials at the ICA, London (2019), Para Site, Hong Kong (2019), Beirut Art Center, Lebanon (2019), the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2018); Hammer Museum (2018), LA; Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2017); New Museum, New York (2017); SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York (2017). She is the recipient of several residencies, grants and fellowships, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2019), the Davidoff Art Residency (2018), Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2017), Delfina Foundation Artist in Residence (2014), Fine Arts Work Center Residency (2012), and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009). She is Assistant Professor of Art at UCLA and lives and works in Los Angeles.

Future Continuous: Present Stream is made possible with support from the Wilhelm Family Foundation and the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.