the Futile Corporation
thiswasyouridea.com

The Futile Corporation is a nebulous, transnational construct operating at the intersection of art, technology, and everyday materiality. In a world of tangled information and commodity flows, elusive organizations exert influence on global markets as well as on personal beliefs. This reality challenges the traditional image of the individual artist-author. Instead of looking back nostalgically, The Futile Corporation harnesses the logic of networked systems to formulate new critical counter-narratives.

local mean time, 2024 / 2025
A series of clocks appears synchronized, yet each precisely displays the local mean time of its respective meridian. The barely perceptible differences unfold as a wave of time shifts—not arbitrary, but an expression of the sun’s movement over each location. The installation points to the alienation caused by global time: a grid developed in the industrial age that overlays local temporal rhythms and forces people worldwide to synchronize with distant timekeepers. Time is de-localized—and undermines the local significance of time as a structuring force for a situated social rhythm.

Jury Statement:
The Futile Corporation local mean time is a digital spatial installation that subtly engages with local conditions and the rhythm of time. Through the skillful use of digital technology and a profound exploration of science, technology, and the concept of time, it has created an artwork that not only impresses aesthetically but also provokes thought.
It opens up a theoretical field spanning globalization and the regulated functioning of our society, all the way to a return to a pre-digital, ungridded time—when exact location and the direct relationship to the sun defined true local time.
We appreciated how an immersive sound sculpture was created here using simple technical means, one that plays with space and time and thoughtfully opposes today’s trend of synchronization, simplification, and generalization.
The focus on the here and now—the moment and the place we find ourselves in—comes closest, among all submissions (which were diverse and very accomplished), to the idea of the world we want to live in.

Jury: Gabriele Spindler (Head of Art and Cultural Studies OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH), Markus Reindll (Department for Art and Culture Stadt Linz), Julia Staudach (Curator OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH), Manuela Naveau (Artist and Professor Kunstuniversität Linz), and Reinhard Gattinger (Art Representative, Energie AG Oberösterreich)