BU-CON

BU-CON was founded in 2004 by artists in Detroit, MI, USA in an effort to inhabit the form of an infrastructure development company and effect an authorial position with respect to the troubling situation between technology and life systems in the world. The collaborative work of BU-CON in the category of art comprises material artifacts within an optimistic frame of reference as a resource in the Afterfuture, its term for an imminent non-utopia suggested by the material information of the existing world.

 

The premise of BU-CON allows for personnel to develop contingencies for cases in which infrastructure foundational to contemporary life fails or becomes unavailable. The scope and vision of BU-CON addresses the scale of infrastructure for the scale of the Earth. However, its thinking is implemented at the scale of individual and regional vernacular, echoing in material aspect prior organized activity, such as the emergence of cargo cults and the Michigan Militia as local responses to social change

 

The theme of poverty in the work of BU-CON functions as both a hopeful indication of the common accessibility of its method of thinking and a formalistic acknowledgement of the material philosophy of artists such as Giovanni Anselmo who believed that the substance of artistic action lies not in the fixed image suggested in its material presence but in its underlying energetic phenomena. By attempting to open a common language of agency in the imminent world of the Afterfuture, BU-CON seeks to effect a pathway out of the anxiety of the present moment and into new relations between self and world, being and scale, despair and hope.