This is tomorow ?
urban utopia dystopia heterotopia

The MIT Visual Arts Program hosts a cross-disciplinary lecture series that includes speakers from art, architecture, urbanism and technology from around the world. These speakers will start a discourse to imagine tomorrow's urban living conditions.

nathalie
meetopia

The Whole Earth Catalogue
Access to Tools

«We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory — as via government, big business, formal education, church — has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing — power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.»

The Whole Earth Catalog is an counterculture catalog. It was published regularely by Stewart Brand between 1968 and 1972,and occasionally thereafter, until 1998.
Steve Jobs has described it as the conceptual forerunner of the World Wide Web.[...]

Stewart Brand is a biologist and artist, familiarised with native americans culture, co- developper of the Merry Pranksters, a community of hyppies, artists and intellectuals of the 60's, travelling in a bus / the Magic Bus Trip /from the west cost to the east cost of the usa and centered on aesthetics experiments and acid tests.

The catalogue wanted to provide an «Access to Tools» and education so a reader could "find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever was interested

extracts former page:

The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting. An item is listed in the CATALOG if it is deemed:

1. Useful as a tool,
2. Relevant to independent education,
3. High quality or low cost,
4. Easily available by mail.

web & digital edition

infos on wikipedia

.

.
---
fr

The Whole Earth Catalog

«Nous sommes commes des dieux, et nous pourrions bien exceller à la tâche. Jusqu'ici, le pouvoir institutionnel et la gloire - tel qu'exercé par le gouvernement, le Marché, l'éducation traditionnelle, l'église - ont atteint le point où les défauts bruts masquent les réels bénéfices. Le développement d'un pouvoir personnel et intime est une réponse à ce dilemne - le pouvoir de l'individu à conduire lui-même sa propre éducation, trouver sa propre inspiration, définir son propre environnement et partager son expérience avec tous ceux qui s'y intéressent. Les outils qui aident à ce processus sont réfléchis, et promus dans le Whole Earth catalog»

Le Whole Earth Catalog est un catalogue de la contre-culture des années 60. Il a été édité régulièrement de 1968 à 1972 par Stewart Brand, et ensuite périodiquement jusqu'en 1998. Actuellement une édition web poursuit l'héritage du catalogue dans les domaines de la culture populaire, l'auto-médication, les communautés, les nanotechnologies et le cyberespace.

Stewart Brand est un artiste et biologiste, il s'est familiarisé avec la culture indienne, et a passé beaucoup de temps dans les réserves indiennes de l'ouest des Etats-Unis. il a fait partie des Merry Pranksters, une communauté hippie, qui a sillionné les USA d'ouest en est dans un bus en pratiquant toutes sortes d'expériences esthétiques et mentales comme les Acid Tests.

nathalie
meetopia

DVD Lutz Dammbeck, 2003
language: German subtitle english

«It emerged during my research work on the topic of art and new technologies. Around 10 to 15 years ago, concepts like multimedia, virtuality etc. appeared for the first time in the art context.[...]
In a way, it is possible to understand people like David Gelernter or Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and their technocratic world. They simply wanted to be involved in the development of things like cyberspace, virtuality and artificial intelligence. Set against the background of the dismal fifties and sixties, computers and the first technological networks were very glamorous; as insiders, they felt a bit like the Good Lord himself. Now things have developed further - and differently - and one has to ask oneself whether the technicist utopias and abstract ideas that originated from these people should actually be realised at all. »
Lutz Dammbeck interviewed by Helmut Merschmann for okno.be

Ultimately stunning in its revelations, THE NET explores the incredibly complex backstory of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. This exquisitely crafted inquiry into the rationale of this mythic figure situates him within a late 20th Century web of technology ? a system that he grew to oppose. A marvelously subversive approach to the history of the Internet, this insightful documentary combines speculative travelogue and investigative journalism to trace contrasting countercultural responses to the cybernetic revolution.[...]
For those that embrace it, as did and do the early champions of media art like Marshall McLuhan, Nam June Paik, and Stewart Brand, the promises of worldwide networking and instantaneous communication outweighed the perils. Dammbeck's conceptual quest links these multiple nodes of cultural and political thought like the Internet itself. Circling through themes of utopianism, anarchism, terrorism, CIA, LSD, Tim Leary, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, THE NET exposes a hidden matrix of revolutionary advances, coincidences, and conspiracies.
in thepiratebay/torrent/details

Extracts from The Net
The Cybernetics and the Macy conference

----------

fr

La fascination pour la vision positive d'une mise en réseau mondiale, à laquelle participeraient des citoyens du monde plutôt que des ressortissants de pays, est au centre du film de Lutz Dammbeck. Mais le réalisateur allemand la met en lumière à travers le prisme d'une vision négative..[...]
Qui se cache derrière les attaques contre des scientifiques en informatique aux Etats-Unis entre 1978 et 1995 ? [...] Les cyber-théoriciens comme Stuart Brand prônent la création de systèmes ouverts sur la base de la nouvelle science clef : la cybernétique de Norbert Wiener. Malgré la tournure de toute évidence militaire des premiers réseaux, on n?est surpris qu?au premier regard par les liens avec la scène hippie californienne. Alors que pour eux le cerveau n'est plus qu'un organe de chair et que l'on étudie la transmission d?informations des machines et des êtres vivants, la drogue LSD fait le lien: elle est à la fois utilisée pour élargir le champ de la conscience, mais elle se trouve aussi au centre des recherches psychologiques qui portent sur la reprogrammation des individus.[...]
in riam01

infos
The Net website

nathalie
meetopia