🪐 New book: The Future Without You 🪐

The Future Without You
by Max Pinckers & Thomas Sauvin
Graphic design: Ying Lei
Texts generated by ChatGPT-3 and ChatGPT-3.5, MiniGPT-4 and img2poem
(None of the images in this book were created using artificial intelligence)
Printed by L.capitan (Graphius), Ghent, Belgium
First edition of 800 copies
Published by Beijing Silvermine & Lyre Press in November 2023
ISBN 978-2-9570118-1-0

€40

For this collaboration, Max Pinckers and Thomas Sauvin rummaged through 50.000 transparencies rescued from a recycling center in Beijing. This analog archive from the 1990s consists of stock photos that were produced in the US and ended up in China when a company subsidiary was opened to market them in a new territory.

The images in this archive cover a wide array of subjects, themes, and photographic styles. They were made with the sole intention of being purchased or licensed for nonspecific context. They represent an era of advertising when high-quality, generic visuals would be adopted by companies to avoid the expense and effort of arranging custom photoshoots.

With stock photography embodying the most capitalist form of imagery, Pinckers and Sauvin focused their selection on the world of corporate business, represented by actors of limited talent during a time of anxiety triggered by the arrival of the personal computer and the rise of the Internet.

Reconsidered 30 years later, there is something amusing—but also disturbing, even prophetic—about these images, which seem to have lost none of their relevance with the dawn of artificial intelligence.

We will be presenting the new publication at Polycopies, Paris at booth P58 (Thomas Sauvin / Beijing Silvermine)

Bateau Concorde-Atlantique - Berges de Seine
Port de Solferino - 75007 Paris
Métro: Assemblée Nationale ou Concorde
RER C: Musée d'Orsay

The Courtauld: Modern & Contemporary Series: State of Emergency – Harakati za Mau Mau kwa Haki, Usawa na Ardhi Yetu

I look forward to speaking at The Courtauld in London on 13th November about the ongoing project State of Emergency, a collaboration with Mau Mau war veterans and Kenyans who survived colonial atrocities in the 1950s.

Organised by Dr. Lucy Bradnock and Dr. Bergit Arends as part of the Modern & Contemporary Series.

The Courtauld, Vernon Square Campus, Lecture Theatre 2
Monday 13th November 2023, 5.30pm - 7.00pm
RSVP required

State of Emergency – Harakati za Mau Mau kwa Haki, Usawa na Ardhi Yetu (2014-…), is an ongoing documentary project in collaboration with Mau Mau war veterans and Kenyans who survived colonial atrocities. In the form of in-person reenactments, or ‘demonstrations’, together they (re)visualise the fight for independence from British colonial rule in the 1950s, manifesting their past experiences in the present with a future audience in mind. With most of the colonial archives deliberately destroyed, hidden or manipulated, this project attempts to shine a light on this history’s blind spots by creating new ‘imagined records’ that fill in the missing gaps of historical archives.
State of Emergency interweaves fragmentary colonial archives, photographs of architectural and symbolic remnants from the past, mass grave sites, demonstrations and the testimonies of people who experienced and survived the war themselves. It is a collaborative attempt at rebuilding and reimagining possible futures of reparation and reconciliation. Together with the National Museums of Kenya and members of Mau Mau War Veterans Association, they deliver a collective response aimed at healing—without erasing—the still gaping wounds of colonial violence, creating a restorative instrument of the photographic medium that makes it possible to tell their truths to the powerful.