This past Saturday the Band of Burnouts research lab presented We Are Not Sick at Zurich’s annual contemporary music festival Lange Nacht. As part of the presentation, an accompanying publication was available onsite for guests including an interview with one-half of the We Are Not Sick duo, Geert Lovink. …
This Saturday, my research lab with the School of Commons—Band of Burnouts—is presenting Geert’s band We Are Not Sick at Zurich’s annual contemporary music festival Lange Nacht. You can see all information about the event here.
As part of the intervention, we’ve made a special edition zine which is available onsite at Mehrspur music club. Inside it is an interview between myself and Geert, We Are Not Sick stickers (pictured above), a take-home poster, and micro-publication of the lyrics from band’s debut album ‘Sad by Design.’
Today I’m posting here the introduction to the zine, written by yours truly. …
“Our very existence has turned into a question mark.”
–Nishitani
“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.”
― John Cage
The future is cancelled. We know this by now. It’s not ‘postponed’, that sweet word being politely touted in exchange for the hard truth. Here in Zurich, posters remain in loom for a festival put on by a youth theatre that was to run from January until June – ‘The Future is Cancelled’ they jest in their title. These word still hang on the empty streets. When they were designed last year they would have appeared rebelliously tongue-in-cheek. Those who concepted the title may have felt antagonistic and playful. Running on the funny provocations that ‘youth’ knows it is allowed. Imagine that? What we thought was our future has been broken into fragments of oblivion. Eaten away until it doesn’t even matter. No need to ponder too hard on it. It’s gone. The slow cancellation of the future was not slow at all. …
‘… when you’re buying books, you’re optimistically thinking you’re buying the time to read them.’
― Arthur Schopenhauer
Bought time. COVID-19 is the gift that keeps on giving. All the deadlines have been extended. Tax returns, application dates, returns and special offers. If you weren’t a procrastinator before, you’ll be a convert to the bliss of delay now. Wait long enough and you’ll be afforded an alleviation. Like those clocks that were an hour behind before, overdue tasks that sat undone long enough to come back around nothing wrong.
Where does this sense come from that time as been protracted? Where there were not enough hours in a day before now stand an infinity of days, weeks, months(?). How long we will be here we do not know. The unknowing is the infinite. The ongoing. ‘I’m taking an extended break’ is what they say in offices. Code for a longer-than-usual holiday. Or for when somebody doesn’t know they’ve been fired.
