FUTURE_FORECAST

The Internet and its services rely on infrastructures that span the entire planet: undersea cables, data centres, antennas, satellites... The exhibition FUTURE_FORECAST by Ziyang Wu + Mark Ramos explores these infrastructures and imagines the future of our connected societies from a non-western perspective.

The complex political, economic social, and ecological environment of the Philippines sets the framework for the two works presented in the exhibition. The video Pasig River 2030 - 6 Plus and the playable simulation Future_Forecast question the complex relationship between technological progress, emerging markets, traditional cultures and digital colonialism.

The Pasig River 2030 - 6 Plus video takes us to the Philippines in 2030 on the banks of the Pasig River, which runs through metropolitan Manila. It tells the story of the collaboration between Alihaha, a fictional telecommunications giant and BOT.coin, a blockchain company, together with the Philippine government. Although declared “ecologically dead” in the early 2000s due to pollution, the Pasig River in the video has been revitalized thanks to the joint technological initiatives of these private companies and the government. However, many problems remain. These relate to the surveillance and digital colonisation of the river and the city. With humor and irony, Pasig River 2030 - 6 Plus reveals the contradictions between digital strategies and material reality.

Future_Forecast is a real-time simulation, a game of collective universe-building and a series of characters. It invites players to measure the paradoxical ecological, geopolitical and socio-cultural consequences of their actions through six missions in 6 different spaces. Inspired by Benjamin H. Bratton's Stack theory, Future_Forecast envisions our complex interconnected world as a stack of six interconnected strata: Earth stratum, Cloud stratum, City stratum, Address stratum, Interface stratum, User stratum. By exploring these strata and the cause-and-effect relationships of their actions with the various constituent elements of these environments, Future_Forecast players can act to mitigate the harmful effects linked to the development of digital technology and its infrastructures, such as: toxic gas emissions from data centers, ecological destruction, the prosperity of the dark web and accelerated surveillance by the Internet of Things.