Chara Kotsali: IT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE (working title)

In the aftermath of a technological and social revolution that never happened, “IT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE” wants to reflect on the emotional history of the present. It is an attempt to stage a counter-epic narrative about the rush towards the sun and the freefall into the digital universe.

Broadcasting from a land in the South that never sent a rocket into outer space and grew up with slow internet, this is a sketch for a kinetic and sound chronicle about the "slow cancelation of the future,”[1] and the feeling of techno-sadness.

With a focus on the dancing body and using sound and poetry as its material, the work deals with the contested notion of progress. It is an attempt to compose a sonic and dance narrative

about the collective emotion generated by the take-off into outer space and the simultaneous plunge into cyberspace;

about a permanent crash rehearsal that is not being fulfilled;

about the vertigo of digital rabbit holes;

about bodies floating like space debris.

Nevertheless, “IT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE” is not yet another eschatology for use, not a nostalgia for an exoticized past, but an acceptance that the experiment has fortunately failed. It’s not the end of the world yet, and certainly not the end of history. The poetics of vertigo emerges as the most tender gesture while we fall.

[1] Franco “Bifo” Berardi [Gary Genosko & Nicholas Thoburn (eds.)], After the Future (2011), AK Press, p. 18.