Systems of power emerge slowly, manifesting in the periphery and infiltrating spaces so gradually it's sometimes impossible to reckon with a shifting status quo until it is entrenched. Momentum builds imperceptibly, masking fundamental flaws, damage caused and any counter-thinking that could jeopardise the perception that this new system is anything but an inevitability.
In Soft Power, writers and artists explore what is obscured and nullified in emergent and established systems of power. While these systems are broad and largely intangible, their impacts are felt and documented in very measurable ways.
Explore Janet Bi Li Chan’s carefully rendered erasure poetry interrogating the future of artificial intelligence, before contemplating Talia Smith’s softly animated meditation on remembered family and shores. Try your hand at Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer’s interactive game, which asks you to navigate encounters with three manifestations of online masculinity, before reading Lou Garcia-Dolnik’s essay on the social and environmental costs of bitcoin mining. Watch Ryan Andrew Lee’s contemplative video work that juxtaposes Indigenous ways of living with the western settler-state’s extractive and damaging use of stolen lands, then read Melody Paloma’s poetry on colonial kitsch and the violence of settler-colonial aesthetics. Finally, download and share Roslyn Orlando’s new graphic score, which proposes ways of using the voice to evade detection from domestic smart speakers.
Soft Power presents experimental responses, new critiques and speculative futures in the face of myriad power systems we must confront and dismantle.
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