Future Absentees
Two-channel live telepresence intervention in public space, 16 participants over 4 hours
Pairs of remote visitors log into two TV-headed monoliths stationed along an old Ottoman railway, now a pedestrian trail near the border between East and West Jerusalem, Palestine and Israel. Each remote visitor appears as a face on one of the TVs and can rotate it to see the surroundings. They engage in long, open-ended conversations with each other and with passersby about the present and future of Jerusalem, and the Future in general—moving across topics like transhumanism, political dissent, exile, social justice, and, inevitably, politics and religion. Passersby on the trail may simply observe, intervene via a nearby microphone stand, or be drawn into the conversation when the remote-controlled screens turn to face them.
All remote visitors are people who cannot be physically present due to their political status, residence restrictions, or other barriers. The piece’s title refers to “Present Absentees”, a euphemism coined by the nascent Israeli state after the Nakba of 1948 forced many Palestinians from their homes, to which they were not allowed to return.
The subtitle, Local/Interference, refers both to the unpredictable interruptions of the physical world—a conversation that could have taken place entirely online is instead filtered through a noisy, contested site—and to broader layers of interference in the Israeli/Palestinian environment.
Presented as part of Voice Over/2048 a show dealing with dystopian future Israel/Palestine, curated by Maayan Sheleff, part of the “Manofim” art festival organized by Rinat Edelstein and Lee-Hee Shulov.
The project has since its original presentation evolved to become an ongoing project/archive of conversations about the future, attempting to create an “alternate futurology” by inviting different kinds of “interventionist oracles” to appear at different conflicted sites.
