Petitions are signed, labor unions initiated, digital panel discussions with politicians organised. However, when it comes to conversations around the Covid-19 pandemic’s financial impact on cultural work and the creative industries in The Netherlands I have not heard many voices of my own generation amplified; artists, designers and creatives recently graduated from their master studies in art and design academies and those under thirty years of age. Perhaps it is time for a seat at the table. Yet, a seat at the table where policy is debated and advised upon, does not necessarily allow for a voice to be heard.

Are you familiar with love? In human language it means deep affection. To be honest I think some humans are more capable of loving non-humans than each other. Except, maybe, for those who they consider non-humans while they’re actually humans as well. Are you still following me here? It seems that to some, humans become lesser humans when they are threatening our own safety. And safety, another non-human, is a strange thing you know: it doesn’t necessarily mean being protected from danger. It means a lot more than that. Things unnecessary even.

First of all, I want to express my condolences on the recent loss of Florian Schneider – one of your founding members. All together you created a band that would change the understanding of tone, sound and music infinitely. You have started on the paved way of an Autobahn (1974), but your journey with an unknown destination led you off the beaten track, during which you explored, assessed and embraced the possibilities of a new mode of music creation through the sole use of electronic instruments. Not only the technique was new – your lyrical views were visionary of a world becoming ever more structured, defined and controlled by electronic devices. Considering your work as the prelude of an electronic turn, a plethora of other turns are taking shape at the moment, which we are only in the midst of grasping. An obvious turn emerging from the electronic sphere is the digital one, which, like a liquid entity, found its way to the deepest point possible, as the digital sphere has become one of the fundaments of many societies across the world.

EXT. CENTRAL STATION - MORNING
It’s Fall break. We enter a rental bus that seats about thirty people. As the engine starts, the driver fills a cup with water and puts a leaf with a needle in it to float. His DIY compass points North.

BUS DRIVER
(grinning in an accent while cleaning up his navigation ritual)
“Let’s take the country’s side today”
Some smiles appear on passengers’ faces. The driver takes a sip of water.

Americans are currently coming to terms with systemic failure on three levels. Widespread protests spawned by police brutality and racial injustice have joined an economic crisis not seen since The Great Depression. Having claimed over 4 hundred thousand lives in the past five months, COVID-19 continues to cause trouble in parts of the world that opened too soon, suffer from poor infrastructure, or in which the proper measures have not been implemented at the right time.

I’m writing this letter to you, because you are reading it now.

If Modernity was an attempt to take hold of the present, our current times are geared towards the future. Or rather: the present is formatted by the future. The present can no longer be extrapolated from the past, it is supposedly governed by speculations on what’s believed to come. What happens today is based on a pre-emption of the future, or, so are we told.