Read a text by The Otolith Collective, a long-standing artist-led organisation supporting intergenerational art practice, research-led projects and process-based forms of development.
Bahar Noorizadeh is an artist, theorist, writer and filmmaker based in London. Her work explores the histories of the futures of neoliberal affect, speculation, finance, fiction, credit, value, the weird and the unknown.
The title of Free to Choose alludes to the 15-part television series starring Milton Friedman broadcast on Public Broadcasting Service in the US in 1980. Free to Choose pushes Friedman’s paean to Hong Kong as a ‘free market utopia’ that will ‘set an example for the rest of the world’ to an extreme until it takes on the force of a theory-fiction that extrapolates the affective structure of financialised utopia to an extent that is deeply researched in its delirium, intensively rigorous in its absurdism and triumphantly accomplished in the gleams and the glints of its neo-baroque animation.
Noorizadeh describes Free to Choose as a ‘financial science-fiction opera’ or a ‘fi-fi opera’. Fi-fi is a term invented by Noorizadeh that exemplifies her passion for the proleptic pop poetics of the neologism. Free to Choose depicts the credit system of the future as a Central Time Travel Agency which regulates time travel by managing the wormhole time tunnel between Hong Kong circa 1997 and Hong Kong in 2046.
Drawing upon her extensive research on Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Michel Feher and Rem Koolhaas and working with animator Ruda Babau, her longtime collaborator, and the experimental opera group Waste Paper Opera, Free to Choose envisions a parametric world of multi-planar levels and megastructural perspectives. A CGI world whose vivid luminosity, ultrachromatic incandescence and hypermaxx superimpositions disorient and delight with the unpredictability of its inhabitants, the startling humour of its script and the picaresque episodes of its plot.
A future of time passports, past-phobia, catastrophic time bubbles and chronological exchange rates whose megastructural vision evokes the continued presence of the British colonial government and the Peoples Republic of China in its infrastructural planning projects, real estate booms and lucrative property markets. In Free to Choose, Philip Tose, the actually existing ex-Formula Three racing car driver and CEO of Hong Kong based Peregrine Investment attempts to survive and surpass the 1997 economic crash exacerbated by the collapse of Peregrine Investment by borrowing a lump sum from his older self in the Hong Kong of 2047.
In the search for his future self, Tose encounters the chronopolitical hierarchies that divide a future world in which rating activists demand free time travel for all, McRefugees seek sanctuary in McDonalds and low-credit scored Untrustworthies navigate the floating public housing megastructure of the Space of Flows that extends across the Pearl River from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and Macau to Hong Kong in a networked constellation of cities named the Pearl Megalopolis.
