Horizon99, 2017
Horizon99 was a party series broadcast by LEAP, a project to research, strategise, and organise around reclaiming futures and imaginaries cast off or crushed by the capitalist status quo. Beginning with blurring the conceptual line between a dance and political party, LEAP currently involves the people behind wares, Currency Design, and lhtttt, with this edition of Horizon99 developed in close collaboration with soft/WALL/studs.
The neoliberal political machine, motorised by the engine of “frictionless” free-market ideology, has been sounding its death rattle. Capitalism, as the dominant narrative organising our contemporary relations, commanding totalising projections of the future to come, has exhausted any purported useful function as a system for sustaining life. In its wake lies a slick ruinous web of globalised social and material inequalities, planetary ecological catastrophe, perpetual warfare and subjugation, unending crises of debt and finance, mass disinformation, precarity, alienation, and depression. The normative reality it offers is a dystopia of extraction, accumulation, and competition; a naturalised order which denies an ending. But the cracked mirage reveals a hollowed shell. Alternatives must be designed in its place.
LEAP is a collective platform to speculate, game, trigger, broadcast, and propel radical emancipatory imaginations recuperated from capitalist delusion. It encompasses possibility in multitudinous forms of theory and practice, in ways that may be extant or emergent – be they woven from the political, technological, cultural, or otherwise – and retool them for plotting trajectories away from the forces of reaction. LEAP’s existence serves as a call for action and study concerning a collective future, what it could or should be, and agitate for its necessary materialisation.Tune in, turn up, LEAP out.
Horizon99 was a party series broadcast by LEAP, a project to research, strategise, and organise around reclaiming futures and imaginaries cast off or crushed by the capitalist status quo. Beginning with blurring the conceptual line between a dance and political party, LEAP currently involves the people behind wares, Currency Design, and lhtttt, with this edition of Horizon99 developed in close collaboration with soft/WALL/studs.
The neoliberal political machine, motorised by the engine of “frictionless” free-market ideology, has been sounding its death rattle. Capitalism, as the dominant narrative organising our contemporary relations, commanding totalising projections of the future to come, has exhausted any purported useful function as a system for sustaining life. In its wake lies a slick ruinous web of globalised social and material inequalities, planetary ecological catastrophe, perpetual warfare and subjugation, unending crises of debt and finance, mass disinformation, precarity, alienation, and depression. The normative reality it offers is a dystopia of extraction, accumulation, and competition; a naturalised order which denies an ending. But the cracked mirage reveals a hollowed shell. Alternatives must be designed in its place.
LEAP is a collective platform to speculate, game, trigger, broadcast, and propel radical emancipatory imaginations recuperated from capitalist delusion. It encompasses possibility in multitudinous forms of theory and practice, in ways that may be extant or emergent – be they woven from the political, technological, cultural, or otherwise – and retool them for plotting trajectories away from the forces of reaction. LEAP’s existence serves as a call for action and study concerning a collective future, what it could or should be, and agitate for its necessary materialisation.Tune in, turn up, LEAP out.
Collation of texts that respond to questions of the club, music, rhythm, sound, and other sonic devices, designed by Melvin Tan of Currency Design. It includes my essay “an impasse to verbal: lo-fi sci-fi”, as well as local and transnational voices, including Ujikaji Records, an independent music label and mail order store, artist and musician bani haykal, and Tsalal, a DJ and cook based in Hong Kong.