The Internet, or utopia regained
The insatiable quest for perfect happiness has found an extraordinary mise en scène in the concept of utopia. Let’s disregard for a moment the current, highly negative image of utopia, and come back…
#ELMO meets ELSA
His name is Elmo Fink // 26 years old, 6 ft, 12 stone 4, 99 °F // stable state // brown eyes, shock of black hair // broker, single //. His heart is…
The visible and the invisible
We are witnessing a growing hybridisation of physical space and the virtual sphere. This is the objective assessment to which digital technologies are driving us.
Standing in the underground carriage, I see four…
Imagined space. Towards an architecture of the invisible
Was the city, from its very beginnings, not the first utopia, the first vision of the world, that of the monarchs, the sultans, the maharajahs, the merchants but also that of the tyrants,…
Welcome to digital city
“Planet Earth has become too small for Progress”, Paul Virilio
Imagine an intelligent city in which environmental, traffic and employment problems have been resolved through technology and networks. A city of glass and…
The transubstantiation of Utopia
Utopias are metaphorical formalisations of fundamental tropisms that endure in our cognitive systems like memes or Dickian plasma, determining a number of our individual and collective leanings.
The educational “story-telling” I received in…
The Era of images chosen by the world
Originally, Air de Paris (1919) by Marcel Duchamp was a phial filled with air from Le Havre and not from Paris. Proof, should it be necessary, that Duchamp cared little that its contents…
Partially Buried Utopia
Robert Smithson created one of his first works of Land Art in Kent, Ohio, in January 1970. Partially Buried Woodshed consisted of “partially burying” a woodshed by pouring twenty lorry loads of earth…
An utopia of transparency
Perfect transparency is a recurring theme in classic utopias, evoked regularly in literary works throughout the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. Examples include the crystal palace in Nicolai…
The loss of the evolutionary motivation
The question I am supposed to answer assumes that the solution of all the crises would represent just outlining some new Utopian societies by combining physical and virtual space as a kind of…
