Margareta Kern: Are You Ready?

Are You Ready? performance by Margareta Kern speculates on possible future scenarios where imaginaries of sovereignty and freedom have taken the shape of a sprawling, privatised ‘city-state’ on the ocean. 

Drawing on a range of libertarian proposals for the new floating ‘city-states’ or ‘seasteads’ that promise techno-social freedom on the ocean (imagined as the ultimate ‘terra nullius’) the performance explores how narratives of freedom promulgate crypto-fascist tendencies and neoreactionary imaginaries, from the tech industry of Silicon Valley to our everyday. 

Are You Ready? performance confronts us with a floating world of a fictional tech start-up, whose seatizenship-by-investment schemes and cutting-edge technologies are building radical new forms of competitive governance for its offshore Oceanation. It is a provocative meditation on our contemporary moment where fantasies of exit continue to disrupt and fragment. 

The world’s first known wireless communication sent over the open sea by Marconi in 1897, asked: are you ready?

Commissioned by Whitstable Biennale 2018. Supported by the Arts Council England Project Grant, 2018-2019, Birkbeck School of Law and Real Ideas Organisation.