Bahar Noorizadeh

after scarcity+ the red city of the planet capitalism

How might we use computation to get us out of our current state of digital feudalism and towards new possible utopias?

After Scarcity (31 min. 2018) is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks Soviet cyberneticians in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. Flying through swarms of floating dots outlining monasteries and city streets, After Scarcity flashes through decades of history to propose the ways contingent pasts can make fictive futures realer, showing us that digital socialism was inbred into the communist revolution and that computation doesn’t mean we’re condemned to today’s tyranny of total financialization.

The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism (13 min., 2021) is a 13 min. video installation that revisits proposals for a communist sprawl in the Soviet Union of 1929.