Choose Your Future, 2021, is part of KW Digital: Open Secret, 16 July - 31 December.

joshuacitarella.com/chooseyourfuture/

www.kw-berlin.de/en/open-secret/

In 2021, I commissioned a group of artists and memers to write short wiki-style descriptions of fantastical future scenarios. Writers were instructed to copy/paste existing wikipedia entries and “play mad libs” with the nouns and dates. Drawing on movements from the past, these short stories recombine political history to anticipate long tail ideologies and factions that may soon emerge.

Choose Your Future takes the hyperbolic imaginings of young people, raised on the internet, and puts their words directly into the mouths of content creators. In this way, the project emulates the signal amplification that occurs through social media, as radical takes move from the anonymous fringe into the verified mainstream. Is this the multi-faceted analysis of the Rand Corporation? Or is it a teenage meme poster who thinks it would be cool if these political keywords combined? I’m interested in the point where those spheres overlap.

This project combines the creative efforts of some of the artists, memers and content creators that have most inspired me over the past few years. Texts by: Margo Bergamini, Nick Bird, @ manletpill, David Noel, Abbey Pusz, D.Z. Rowan and Joshua Citarella. Read by: Caroline Busta, Mat Dryhurst, A.M. Gittlitz, Daniel Keller, Anna Khachiyan, Holly Herndon, Lil' Internet, Jack Wagner and Joshua Citarella.

---

Open Secret is a six-month long online program exploring the role of the hidden in our apparently “open” society. Information technologies are supposed to increase our access to knowledge, making the world more legible, while undermining ignorance and superstition. But sometimes the feeling prevails that we have entered a new dark age of black boxes, projections, and paranoia. Techno-culture is obsessed with the unseen, the inaccessible, the known-unknown. Open Secret pursues things that are obscured–through artistic commissions, a suite of essays by leading thinkers, and an intensive public program dedicated to critical reappraisal of the digital infrastructures that organize civic life. With new contributions released on a monthly basis, the Open Secret website will bring together art, technology, politics, and new patterns of exchange.

Curators: Nadim Samman, curator digital sphere, in collaboration with Katja Zeidler, head of education & mediation