Edited by Ursula Davila-Villa in Cantanker magazine, Issue 9, 2009, Austin, Texas, USA.
The verb tense future continuous is used in two different ways to indicate that a longer action in the future will be interrupted by a shorter future action. This interruption can be a real disruption or just a discontinuation in time. For this issue of Cantanker magazine we were invited as guest editors to reflect on the meaning behind future continuous as artistic expression. Our research began with a simple question: what are the interpretations that come to mind when referring to the future as a continuous tense? While we began exploring the use of “I will be going…,” two projects were already underway at the Blanton Museum of Art.
First, WorkSpace 12: Eclipses for Austin a project by Pablo Vargas Lugo, which became an ambitious undertaking as we staged a card-stund performance with 200 people at UT’s Darrel K. Royal Texas Memorial Stadium and recreated four solar eclipses that will occur in Texas over the course of more than 300 years. Second, Letícia Cardoso, Iberê Camargo Foundation residency artist at the Blanton Museum and Creative ResearchLab, arrived in Austin for a two-month stay. For her residency, Cardoso planned to develop a project based on the Texas construct that derives from Wim Wenders’ film Paris, Texas (1984). Both projects placed at their core concepts that strongly related to the perception of a continuous future. Serendipity was on our side, and connecting Eclipses for Austin and Cardoso’s project with the theme for this issue became an interesting task. In the former, Vargas Lugo took an astronomical event as inspiration and projected the production of a piece that would recreated the future in the present. In the latter, Cardoso planned a trip through Texas that intertwined a lost love story with personal feelings towards unknown landscapes. What continues is an introduction to both projects that further describes the ideas that lie behind this two-part Future Continuous issue.
The continuity of our future lies in our hands, but as defined by Englishpage.com, our actions in the future will surely be interrupted by other events that will provide new possibilities to reinvent our lives. It is only then when we can understand future continuous as expectation, anticipation, surprise, improvisation, and hopefully as new experiences that enrich the present.