Mark Fridvalszki

This archaeo-futurological metacollage is the result of a paradoxical strategy of excavating the past in search of the future. Can We Feel It? excavates the visual remnants of modernist visions and lost futures. It combines material from two distinct, but in many ways parallel, forward-looking periods: the heyday of "Popular Modernism" in the late 1960s and the period of the Rave Movement's struggle against the neoliberal invasion of the cultural and political imagination in the late 1980s. In the background of the cover of the book Innovation, Models for the Future (WWF, 1998) appear the Twipsy mascot of Expo 2000, a fragment from the graphics of the architecture collective Superstudio, a scanned image of the Earth from the Whole Earth Catalogue (1994), a patch of Ad Futura – Ad Inexplorata (Into the Future, Into the Unknown) by Mark Fridvalszki, an image of the Concorde launch, the redesigned page from the Macromedia Freehand clipart catalogue – computer applications for creating 2D vector graphics from 1995, an acid house fanzine from the 90s, a fragment of a newspaper article about ecstasy, the Love Decade flyer of the last "real" illegal acid house rave in the 80s, a poster of the Fehmarn Festival – one of the last hippie festivals of the 60s with the last performance of Hendrix, the Iskra Delta logo and many other references. Together they form an artistic tool for a spectro-political strategy that evokes the exiled ghosts of modernity and the repressed but still intense utopian impulses of the past, helping to break through the temporal claustrophobia of our presentist age.