The Future Is Heatsick

Steven Warwick of Heatsick says the future is now. No irony, no middle finger directed at anyone. Don’t get hung up on past failures; don’t plan ahead. We spent the morning talking with the British-born, Berlin-based artist, notorious for his playful experiments in dance music, about playing endless sets, nostalgia and coping with how fast things seem to be going nowadays. Or has it always been like this? Breathe in, breathe out…

We’re supposed to be talking about the future, but I wanted to talk about the present.

I think the present is the real future, it’s happening right now! The future has become this modernist utopia and it’s almost retro to talk about it, you know? I feel like there’s a real culture of FOMO (fear of missing out) that stems from a panicked mentality: you have to be everywhere All. The. Time. It’s not affirmative, it’s based purely on fear. I think that’s a large part of how experience is structured these days. And people get interpolated into different positions. At one extreme, you can have people who know what’s happening all the time, and then others will have a 19th-century, retreat-from-technology mentality and say they’re old, grumpy and jaded. It’s important to mediate that, otherwise you’ll get some silly steampunk, postmodern thing, like those general stores in Peckham that look like Disney. You don’t have to do that ‘for and against’ thing with this stuff.

Why do you think there’s this nostalgia for pre-internet days where we used payphones and happily asked strangers for directions?

I think that’s people with amnesia who are romanticising a past that they weren’t even a part of. It was totally boring and frustrating. You’d sit in your room wishing that something like a smartphone existed. I was thinking about this this morning – because you had a strong fanzine scene, you’d go to gigs and it felt more like a subculture. People would bond more because they realised that was the only way of interacting. About 15 years ago I was listening to really obscure music that people had copied for me. Because you knew it was there, but it was hard to get, you searched more. If you can visualise yourself as a fly on a big billiard table, then it’s just overwhelming. Whereas before you couldn’t do that as easily, and it felt more like detective work.

If you plan for the future, you’re not really living because you’re comparing it with your past, your shortcomings, and you go up into this weird feed-back loop of regret

We often worry that the more we are aware of each other and ourselves and the more we consume, the more homogenous we become. How does this relate to your work as an artist?

I guess I just check-out sometimes. When I played a four-hour set at Unsound Festival last year I played this very extended anti-festival set. There was a big risk for it to not go well. But people were able to immerse themselves in it. I’m very interested in time and duration. Philosophical theories around accelerationism, programmed obsolescence, premature sell-by-dates on products: I feel people don’t really believe in all of that. And when I do an extended set like that, it reaffirms that it’s still okay to experiment with long duration. When you spend such a long time listening to one set, you become very conscious of your environment, and that’s inherently more futuristic, because you’re experiencing something now and that can affect how you will be. If you plan for the future, you’re not really living because you’re comparing it with your past, your shortcomings, and you go up into this weird feedback loop of regret. There’s this quote about constructing the human as a hypothesis, I think that’s more interesting: just see what happens.

Do you believe in endings?

Depends what it means. The end of humanity – maybe. I think people like to have an end so that they can compartmentalise something. I would happily programme an endless set. I’ve been looking into more automated work recently. I’d either have a programme do it for me or some other kind of entity, but I’d let it deviate.

Heatsick follows up his 3 hour Extended Play set at TrouwAmsterdam with a special set at OT301 on 11 July. This time he’s joined by Karen Gwyer and Luc Mast & Arif Malawi.