Twenty Plots For Things To Come is a new moving image piece produced by Heman Chong and Anthony Marcellini which involves a code that draws in thousands of images from the online collection banks of science museums around the world. Projected randomly over a soundtrack made from 20 fragments that the artists wrote about the future, the work points to a narrative that constantly shifts, existing in a state of the erratic, the itinerant. The artists have promised to never update the links that points to these images. Over time, these links will collapse and the work will not resist this digital corrosion. Twenty Plots For Things To Come was commissioned for Dissident Futures at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Chong and Marcellini have collaborated on numerous projects since 2005, developing their working strategy over a long period of sustained conversation on the ideas and methodologies of artistic practice. Their projects explore systems for autonomy, risk, generosity and compromise within artistic production and their deep interest in literary forms means that they often blur the boundaries between the written word and visual art. TWENTY PLOTS FOR THINGS TO COME, their most recent collaboration, takes quotidian objects and systems and re-imagines them as something recognizable yet changed, providing a method both for evaluating the world today and for imagining where the future may take us. The results of their efforts capture the unease many feel about the future, expressed by how we envision it in the here and now.

Image: Courtesy of Michael Janssen Gallery