“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” (William Gibson)

For our 11th edition, we turn our attention to time — its many shapes, speeds, and politics. We explore chronopolitics: the struggles over how time is structured, controlled, and experienced. We listen for temporalities that have been marginalized, erased, or constrained. We move from deep ecological time to ancestral myth time, from the frantic acceleration of the now to the slow drift of deceleration, from haunted pasts to imagined futures. We dream reality into being.

“You know the future is really happening when you start feeling scared.” (Shumon Basar)

Time is political. It is not universal — it is situated, embodied. Time is not a straight line, it unfolds in spirals, glitches, ruptures, in temporal slips. It is a texture. We aim to release alternative temporal orders that disrupt dominant conceptions of time, unsettling how we think and live within it, and opening the possibility for us all to become otherwise. We advocate for a chronopolitics of equality.

Marked by a shared sense of a historical ending in sight – the end of democracy, liberalism, a cool planet, in a time of war, climate catastrophe, pandemic emergency, racial injustice, we seem stuck in a collective sentiment of “Endcore” – “We feel like The End is approaching, like an astroid is hurtling towards us; but it also strangely never seems to reach us“ (Shumon Basar). When the present is “stretched into an endless crisis loop”, we no longer build the future, we just manage catastrophe. (Bifo Berardi), The Western model of linearity, constant growth, and acceleration has led to the “slow cancellation of the future” (Mark Fisher), a future without future. Instead of running loops in dystopic no-time, we want to build on the multiple temporal dimensions that disrupt capitalist time.

“That there should be time no longer” (Revelation 10:6, New Testament)

In the 20th century, fascism mobilized anxious now-time as a state of permanent crisis. Time has been colonized, racialized, economized. Technology bends our sense of duration, urgency, and memory. Our digital lives compress time into a perpetual present, a “space that has been robbed of temporality” where updates arrive instantly and algorithms predict our next move. Today, accelerationist capitalism keeps pushing us faster. We reject the hegemony of the technological-industrial, Western linear model that homogenizes time in oppressive narratives of progress. Instead, we embrace indigenous, Black, multispecies, and anti-capitalist politics of time as the origin of radical futurisms, and of a justice-to-come. We want to reclaim agency over our timelines, dismantle temporal borders, and expand the possible. As Black Quantum Futurism notes, quantum physics dissolves the sequence of past, present, and future in favor of simultaneity — multiple cyclical time levels coexisting.

“Dismantling the Master’s Clock” (Rasheeda Phillips)

This year we offer a Time Dream Rhythm Machine — a holistic device for hacking the clocks that govern our lives, for inhabiting the fractures where futures leak into the now. The Time Dream Rhythm Machine is our proposal: to sample, loop, and remix temporalities until linear progress collapses into spirals, until time is revealed as entangled.