The Thousand-Year Plan

Douglas Coupland is optimistic about the future. He should be - he's a Futurologist; someone that believes the future is "not about guessing", but "a means of looking at right now and figuring out the logical consequences of what we're doing at the moment". According to his work in two new shows, I Like the Future and the Future Likes Me and Lost and Gained in Translation, there's much to look forward to, and to look back on and figure out. It's an endlessly looping, intersecting, spiraling string of possibilities for trying to understand how the future is, and what the future thinks about the present, and what translation does to messages we send out into the universe today.

In I Like the Future and the Future Likes Me, Coupland conjures life in the year 3005, as his "favourite event horizon is 1000 years". The influence of the time and place of his youth on the West coast of North America in the latter half of the 20th century is a clear motivation. Growing up he was fascinated with Japan, seemingly years ahead, and was certainly touched by the rise of television, film, high-tech, and counterculture tribes.

The conceptual reality of I Like the Future and the Future Likes Me includes specimen jars containing meteorites and Ramen noodles, that comments on our equal fascination with things interminable and things temporary. Thoughts about current medical science, DNA, disease and the like are expressed through a series of death stars made of discarded syringes, aptly named "Jurassic Death Stars". One of the syringes in the specimen is actually a non-sterile needle taken from the streets of Vancouver. Coupland alludes to weighty issues of epidemics, pandemics, and contemporary thoughts on disease. A Lego-like star ship represents, as Coupland states, "a corrupted form of architectural space", and " a fossil of a future that never existed to begin with". Our fantasies about the future, about time and space, the universe, the epic grandeur of a "Star Wars" era are put on display for our descendents. It's unknown whether our notions will be admired or laughed at, but the universality of this image in our culture is undeniable.

In Lost and Gained in Translation, Coupland investigates the new meaning of translation in a world of file sharing, search engine translations, and endless digital replication of text-based work. As the artist states, "Any paragraph pumped through massive translation ends up with a huge amount of chaff (strands of numbers, etc.). However, once removed, the remains are often a chilling reductive haiku of the initial text". This is the impetus for his large translation pieces, based on a book project with Hans Obrist, called Do It. These pieces come across as intelligible word puzzles, a somewhat recognizable form of the original but different in an essentially mysterious way through the process of translation and re-translation.

Further to this idea, Coupland's series of hornet nests explores translation as a physical act. Coupland chewed pages from his own books and formed the nests that are for him, "a primary way of relating to books that takes them outside of historical and cultural time, redirecting them to a humanless world". The crux of these pieces lies in the ongoing dialogue on whether they are still the books, or whether they are now entirely a nest, or whether they are something in-between; perhaps just an idea that lives in the ether.

Regardless of what you believe about the future, or translation, or any of the themes in Coupland's new works, his uncanny ability to pluck from pop culture the most absorbing qualities we have, make his contribution to the future transforming for the viewer in the here and now, and beyond.

Lost and Gained in Translation, and I Like the Future and the Future Likes Me are installed at the Monte Clark gallery, through September 11th, 2005.