Road to Futures Past
2025, Video work, 13 min
This short film explores two temporalities of predictive power. The first part draws on ten years of collected material, in which Elon Musk predicts self-driving cars for next year, to demonstrate how future promises legimitize present actions. The second part examines predictive policing, showing how data from the past is leveraged to justify the continuation of police practices in the present. Thereby past and the future can act as temporal points of legitimization for actions in the present. Both obscuring the present as a site where power distribution takes place. In the third part, these two legitimization strategies come together and visually culminate in the increasing deployment of Tesla vehicles in police forces, reflecting the growing convergence between tech elites and state institutions engaged in repressive actions.