Category Archives: New Utopia

By now, we know that autonomous vehicles are around the corner. Most of us probably dream of how easy it would be to get around, sitting in the backseat and sipping on gin and juice. However, what I think is less appreciated is that the cities we live in will themselves have to be redesigned to accommodate the coming revolution. And it will not be simple.

Cars were the great connector of the 20th century. They allowed more and more people to travel farther and farther. One consequence of this was urban sprawl, with relatively far-flung suburbs growing because of the indispensability of cars. But the downsides of urban sprawl include increased emissions, longer travel times, and car dependence.

Though they are culturally important, human-driven cars are also hugely inefficient. Most cars on the road are single occupant, and are parked for 95 percent of their working life. This space inefficiency is worsened by the huge parking spaces cars take up. The United States has 253 million vehicles but almost 1 billion parking spots, roughly taking up an area equivalent to Connecticut.

Differently designed models of self-driving car ownership can help alleviate these problems.

By design, autonomous vehicles have certain inherent advantages over human-driven vehicles. They are becoming much safer and less prone to human error. They can run quickly bumper-to-bumper while communicating with one another, ensuring that its safe. The result is that roads can be made narrower as the cars make fewer errors, freeing up space for liveable and walkable streets and plazas.

Since they are self-driven, these vehicles can also be used while the operator is at work. This means your Tesla could drop you off and then go off to make money for you through ridesharing and carpooling while you work. The freed up parking spaces could be repurposed for other uses.

However, pending the arrival of fully autonomous vehicles, regular vehicles will still exist and require parking spaces. The transition wont be smooth and there likely wont ever be 100 percent autonomous adoption. I imagine in many rural areas, petrol and diesel vehicles will still be useful.

As a result, parking garages today are being built with the expectation of some kind of future mixed-use conversions. For instance, in Los Angeles, the developer AvalonBay Communities Inc. has started building convertible parking garages with space for these future vehicles.

But this massive change in urban design wont come about easily. Poorly handled, it could actually lead to an increase in urban sprawl.

When you make an economic input cheaper, the net effect isnt to use less, said Anthony Townsend, author of Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, to Wired. Its to use a lot more of it. So without restrictions or disincentives, well have more cars.

Regardless, the best we can do now is to design cities around the coming threat to the status quo. Investment into autonomous vehicles is increasing every year yet most cities are unprepared for self-driving cars. This isnt just an intra-industry problem. Its also a policy problem, an ethical problem, and a national problem. Its time to act.

Reach columnist Arunabh Satpathy at opinion@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @sarunabh

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Design Eats the World: City slicker? - Dailyuw

Celebrated actor Jim Broadbent (Topsy-Turvy, Iris, Moulin Rouge) has been confirmed to provide the voiceover for the feature documentaryNew Town Utopia, a powerful, challenging documentary film about Basildon in Essex.

New Town Utopia is Directed by Christopher Ian Smith (Arterial, Cumulus). The Executive Producer is Margaret Matheson (Scum, Sid and Nancy, Sleep Furiously). It is due to be completed in June 2017 before playing at film festivals worldwide.

It is a film about grand utopian dreams and harsh concrete realities Basildon was a town designed with new ideas and poetic ambitions, but 70 years on, it has a bad reputation, fragmented community and failing economy. What happened to the utopian dream?

Basildons story mirrors that of many British towns wounded by globalisation, failed by national policy and barely surviving in the shadow of London. Its seen as a political barometer of the state of the nation from being Little Moscow On The Thames in the 70s to home of Thatchers Basildon Man in the 80s. It turned to Blair in the 90s and Brexit in 2016. Over the years its been labelled many things most of them bad.

Jim Broadbent will play the voice role of Lewis Silkin, the driving force behind the building of British New Towns by Britains post WW2 Labour government.

New Town Utopia is an audiovisual journey through populated ruins a story told through the performances, art and memories of passionate artists whove led challenging, often hilarious and sometimes tragic lives. This includes a puppeteer (and his angry puppets), poets, musicians and a painter. They share one thing in common, a refusal to give up creating, against all the odds. The Director, Chris explained why he is making this film:

New Town Utopiais a passion project about a place close to my heart. It tries to understand the complexities of a place so often derided. Ive tried to do this in a way that reflects the eccentricities, creative spirit and down-to-earth humour of people and communities of Basildon. This is a film that needed to be made now as the housing crisis grows, globalisation decimates traditional high streets, and the Brexit vote revealed the depth of dissatisfaction of people with their lot.

To view the teaser trailer for the film visit:https://vimeo.com/182321724

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Jim Broadbent confirmed for New Town Utopia - SWNS

Rick Massimo, who covered the event for nine years for The Journal, traces the ups and downs of the festival from its beginning to its current renaissance.

There's been a whole lot written about the Newport Folk Festival since 1959, when Pete Seeger, the Kingston Trio and a very young Joan Baez played at Freebody Park. Entire forests have been denuded to supply enough pages for the endless descriptions, anecdotes and analyses of the night in 1965 when Bob Dylan "went electric."

Now former Providence Journal reporter Rick Massimo has written the first book to cover the entire history of the Folk Festival, titled "I Got a Song; A History of the Newport Folk Festival." Massimo, who covered the event for nine years, traces the ups and downs of the festival from its beginning to its current renaissance, when tickets are sold out even before the acts are announced.

Massimo, who now lives in Washington, D.C., said the book grew out of a series of stories he wrote for The Journal to mark the 50th anniversary of the Festival in 2009.

The Journal had sent Massimo to New York, where he spent the day with George Wein, the founding producer of the festival (and its older brother, the Newport Jazz Festival). On the train ride back to Providence, Massimo said, he was planning a series of articles, and realized there was enough material there for a book.

And here it is, from the Wesleyan University Press, with an official publication date of Tuesday.

"The book is so valuable to me, I can't tell you," Wein said in a phone interview. "It brings back memories of things I've forgotten about. It's so important that we know our own history. We didn't keep records the way we should have back then, which was a mistake on our part. But we were too busy just trying to put on the festivals."

Massimo pointed out that Wein is a jazz man through and through, with a deep knowledge (and love) for jazz. Folk, not so much.

So, Massimo wrote, over the years Wein has employed four men to serve as his "native guides" to the folk world: Albert Grossman, Pete Seeger, Bob Jones and Jay Sweet.

"He knows what he doesn't know," Massimo said of Wein. "And he knows what he needs to get to make up for that."

"My job in life has been to create things," Wein said. "But I never tried to be a micro-manager. You have to give autonomy to the people who are working for you."

Of the four native guides, Seeger is the most famous and most loved. Jay Sweet, current executive producer for the Newport Festivals Foundation, frequently invokes Seeger's spirit, and the Folk Festival runs a program each day called "For Pete's Sake" to honor the traditions of bluegrass, gospel and roots music.

It was Seeger who presided over the early '60s period that Wein dubbed "Utopia," when every performer played for $50 each, and the spirit of the civil-rights movement was a palpable presence. Utopia was aptly represented in 1963, when Dylan, Baez, Seeger, the Freedom Singers, and Peter, Paul & Mary were among those singing "We Shall Overcome" at the festival finale.

Utopia was punctuated by the night of July 25, 1965, when Dylan split the folk world by playing with a rock band.

Massimo captures the event by assembling an artful collage of eyewitness accounts, fragmented and often contradictory. The crowd booed. Or they cheered. Or both. Seeger wanted to cut the power cables with an ax. Or he didn't. What Dylan did was a horrible sellout. Or it was fantastic.

"It didn't take me long to realize that the range of recollections on the part of the people who were there, that was the story," Massimo said. "It's refracted through so many different lenses, and the fact that there is so little agreement says so much about what happened."

The Folk Festival has had its share of down times in its 58-year history, and from 1971 to 1985 it disappeared from Newport entirely, overwhelmed by the impact of rock and the riots that marred the Newport Jazz Festival.

The festival returned to Newport in the '80s to a different location, at Fort Adams State Park, and a different vibe. For one thing, the music ended by sundown. And the festival acquired corporate sponsors.

If anyone symbolized the festival in those years, it was the Indigo Girls, who played eight times between 1991 and 1999. What's more, they respected the history and communal ethos of the festival.

But by 2006, Massimo wrote, the festival was at a low point. Even the Indigo Girls, who used to generate sellouts, only drew 4,600 people (out of a possible 10,000). In 2007, Wein sold his festivals to an outfit called Festival Network. But by 2009, Festival Network had defaulted on its payments to the state, which owns Fort Adams, and Wein had grabbed the reins again.

One of the few holdovers from Festival Networks was Sweet, who would become the fourth of Wein's "native guides." Sweet has made the Newport Folk Festival a place to be once again, programming hip young choices such as The Avett Brothers, Fleet Foxes, the Decembrists, the Lumineers and Rhode Island's Deer Tick, plus surprises such as Jack White, Beck, and Roger Waters.

Sweet uses the festival's storied history as a draw, and expects the people who play Newport to know they are somewhere special.

"I think the key phrase is 'Let them know you know where you are,'" said Massimo. "If you can play a set that indicates you know you're at a festival that was started by George Wein and Pete Seeger, you will be OK."

Massimo is confident that Wein, 91, has put a structure in place that will keep the Folk Festival (and the Jazz Festival) in Newport after he has gone. The Folk Festival is located on a peninsula on an island, Massimo said, and it will never be a massive happening such as Coachella or Bonaroo. But as long as it maintains its organic, word-of-mouth appeal, it should be fine.

The question of what constitutes folk music was debated well before the Newport Folk Festival started, and continues to this day, and Massimo poses a series of rhetorical questions early in his book: Is it folk if it's played by a professional musician. Is it folk if it's played on an electric guitar? Is it folk music if it's popular? Or not popular?

In Wein's mind, folk music is still being made. "There are young people who want to play acoustic instruments, and they want to sing songs related to what is happening in the world," he said.

Massimo will be at Books on the Square in Providence on July 27, at the Newport Folk Festival July 30, and at the Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River on Aug. 2.

asmith@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7485

On Twitter:@asmith651

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New book chronicles Newport Folk Festival - The Providence Journal

Sometimes, one has to see political narratives not in terms of instrumental tactics, or technocratic probes but in terms of folklore and stereotypes. They capture the nature of truth in a way that a secular narrative cannot. One senses this as one looks at the BJPs ambitions to conquer the south.

In an electoral sense, the BJP is an outsider to south India. It is stereotypically a Hindu-Hindi party. It today claims to be a national party ready to spread the saffron wave deep south. At one level, it feels like an alien invasion. Fundamental to this strategy is the years of networking built by the RSS. The BJP is only the tip of the iceberg completing an electoral victory after the RSS has entered the south. The geographies of the imagination do not convey the idea of an election but more an act of infiltration.

For years, the south was a fortress which the BJP could not enter. Part of the reason for this is that the BJP spoke an idiom of nation-state and identity politics the south did not share. The BJP reflected a narrative the south was contemptuous of. It reflected the waves of social movements, which had fought for social justice, while the BJP remained a casteist party. Second, the BJP equated Hindi with India, an equation which the south, particularly Chennai, would not accept. One remembers Annadurai talking of a seceding south being listened to by a tolerant Congress. It is a prospect a BJP would not tolerate. It is the emptying out of political movements and the return of pragmatic politics that has made the south ready for BJP.

I remember as a child I went home for vacation to the south. As I crossed the Andhra Pradesh border, I almost felt I was seceding every summer. The south, I felt, was a different country where we behaved differently. Apart from Bollywood, as a child, I did not feel Hindi India had much to offer. Frankly, I felt as Indian as anyone, it is only the BJP dialect I felt was parochial. The decline of a cosmopolitan south concerned with justice has made it vulnerable to the BJP.

In fact, when one thinks of politics in Kerala, one thought of the Church, the CPI(M), and the Congress. There was a vitality to the debates on land and even the Church had a sense of the organic, native, and indigenous the BJP could never have. Today Marxist ideology is dead, the Church is conservative, the Congress dead-wood. It is as if a whole cast of characters and a wonderful set of scripts brilliantly enacted by the Congress and CPI(M) have been erased. The result is the entry of the BJP as a B grade alternative to the great cameo acts of the past. In a way, what one sees here is the decline of acts of political justice. The new aspirational, mobile, global south Indian is more ready for the BJP and Narenda Modi than for epic battles of ideology and electoral politics.

The BJP knows its footprints are still new. It has to adapt local styles and heroes and the irony is that film which once kept it out is becoming the vehicle for its belated entry. In the earlier era, that film scripted a theory of politics that made the BJP irrelevant. But one must remember it was in an era where the film star and the politician was one person, like the DMK script writers, like Rama Rao, or Raj Kumar. Film and politics were warp and weft of one imagination. Today the ideological power of the film is over. What it however left behind was the fan club, cadre of fans who were as powerful as the CPI(M) cadre or the RSS shakha. In a pragmatic way, the BJP has decided to co-opt the stars with fan clubs, giving them a fan base which eventually becomes a party base.

There is something surreal about the possibility of a Rajinikanth joining hands with a Modi. It is like a confluence of two badly scripted films. It is like politics as a symbolic fiction and film as a symbolic politics combining to create a new utopia, a hybridity to fill up the emptiness of southern politics. It is as if a pan-Indian second-hand state is being created, which makes pragmatic sense to both sides. A Rajinikanth keeps southern populist honour intact as RSS cadre merge with is fans in surreal delight. Rajinikanth could have been a counter to the Modi wave, giving a respite to southern politics. Unfortunately, an alliance of convenience might make him the Trojan horse of Indian politics. For an old-fashioned politico like me, it is the ultimate nightmare. Politics is the happy transition actors in the twilight of stardom are looking for and the BJP has a pragmatic sense of this.

The BJP is a master of factional politics in Andhra Pradesh. Fundamentally, it acts as if every party is a regional extension to its nationalist presence. It becomes both a complement and an opposition to each party quietly capturing the oppositional space, which is a temptation to many out of power politicians.

Its real politics is its politics of patience. And pragmatism. The arrival of the BJP will create a new pragmatic politics without the old colour and character of the south. It will be an irony of democracy, which political pundits will take years to recover from.

Shiv Visvanathan is social science nomad

The views expressed are personal

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Modi, Rajini, churches: Why south India finds BJP more acceptable now - Hindustan Times

Liberal and conservative dystopias do battle, in proxy wars of the imagination.CreditIllustration by Daniel Zender

Here are the plots of some new dystopian novels, set in the near future. The world got too hot, so a wealthy celebrity persuaded a small number of very rich people to move to a makeshift satellite that, from orbit, leaches the last nourishment the earth has to give, leaving everyone else to starve. The people on the satellite have lost their genitals, through some kind of instant mutation or super-quick evolution, but there is a lot of sex anyway, since its become fashionable to have surgical procedures to give yourself a variety of appendages and openings, along with decorative skin grafts and tattoos, there being so little else to do. There are no children, but the celebrity who rules the satellite has been trying to create them by torturing women from the earths surface. (We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power, the novels narrator says.) Or: North Korea deployed a brain-damaging chemical weapon that made everyone in the United States, or at least everyone in L.A., an idiot, except for a few people who were on a boat the day the scourge came, but the idiots, who are otherwise remarkably sweet, round up and kill those people, out of fear. Led by a man known only as the Chief, the idiots build a wall around downtown to keep out the Drifters and the stupidest people, the Shamblers, who dont know how to tie shoes or button buttons; they wander around, naked and barefoot. Thanks, in part, to the difficulty of clothing, there is a lot of sex, random and unsatisfying, but there are very few children, because no one knows how to take care of them. (The jacket copy bills this novel as the first book of the Trump era.)

Or: Machines replaced humans, doing all the work and providing all the food, and, even though if you leave the city it is hotter everywhere else, some huffy young people do, because they are so bored, not to mention that they are mad at their parents, who do annoying things like run giant corporations. The runaways are called walkaways. (I gather theyre not in a terribly big hurry.) They talk about revolution, take a lot of baths, upload their brains onto computers, and have a lot of sex, but, to be honest, they are very boring. Or: Even after the coasts were lost to the floods when the ice caps melted, the American South, defying a new federal law, refused to give up fossil fuels, and seceded, which led to a civil war, which had been going on for decades, and was about to be over, on Reunification Day, except that a woman from Louisiana who lost her whole family in the war went to the celebration and released a poison that killed a hundred million people, which doesnt seem like the tragedy it might have been, because in this future world, as in all the others, theres not much to live for, what with the petty tyrants, the rotten weather, and the crappy sex. It will not give too much away if I say that none of these novels have a happy ending (though one has a twist). Then again, none of them have a happy beginning, either.

Dystopias follow utopias the way thunder follows lightning. This year, the thunder is roaring. But people are so grumpy, what with the petty tyrants and such, that its easy to forget how recently lightning struck. Whether we measure our progress in terms of wiredness, open-mindedness, or optimism, the country is moving in the right direction, and faster, perhaps, than even we would have believed, a reporter for Wired wrote in May, 2000. We are, as a nation, better educated, more tolerant, and more connected because ofnot in spite ofthe convergence of the internet and public life. Partisanship, religion, geography, race, gender, and other traditional political divisions are giving way to a new standardwirednessas an organizing principle. Nor was the utopianism merely technological, or callow. In January, 2008, Barack Obama gave a speech in New Hampshire, about the American creed:

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.... Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.

That was the lightning, the flash of hope, the promise of perfectibility. The argument of dystopianism is that perfection comes at the cost of freedom. Every new lament about the end of the republic, every column about the collapse of civilization, every new novel of doom: these are its answering thunder. Rumble, thud, rumble, ka-boom, KA-BOOM!

A utopia is a paradise, a dystopia a paradise lost. Before utopias and dystopias became imagined futures, they were imagined pasts, or imagined places, like the Garden of Eden. I have found a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa, and, in addition, a climate milder and more delightful than in any other region known to us, Amerigo Vespucci wrote, in extravagant letters describing his voyages across the Atlantic, published in 1503 as Mundus Novus, a new world. In 1516, Thomas More published a fictional account of a sailor on one of Vespuccis ships who had travelled just a bit farther, to the island of Utopia, where he found a perfect republic. (More coined the term: utopia means nowhere.) Gullivers Travels (1726) is a satire of the utopianism of the Enlightenment. On the island of Laputa, Gulliver visits the Academy of Lagado, where the sages, the first progressives, are busy trying to make pincushions out of marble, breeding naked sheep, and improving the language by getting rid of all the words. The word dystopia, meaning an unhappy country, was coined in the seventeen-forties, as the historian Gregory Claeys points out in a shrewd new study, Dystopia: A Natural History (Oxford). In its modern definition, a dystopia can be apocalyptic, or post-apocalyptic, or neither, but it has to be anti-utopian, a utopia turned upside down, a world in which people tried to build a republic of perfection only to find that they had created a republic of misery. A Trip to the Island of Equality, a 1792 reply to Thomas Paines Rights of Man, is a dystopia (on the island, the pursuit of equality has reduced everyone to living in caves), but Mary Shelleys 1826 novel, The Last Man, in which the last human being dies in the year 2100 of a dreadful plague, is not dystopian; its merely apocalyptic.

The dystopian novel emerged in response to the first utopian novels, like Edward Bellamys best-selling 1888 fantasy, Looking Backward, about a socialist utopia in the year 2000. Looking Backward was so successful that it produced a dozen anti-socialist, anti-utopian replies, including Looking Further Backward (in which China invades the United States, which has been weakened by its embrace of socialism) and Looking Further Forward (in which socialism is so unquestionable that a history professor who refutes it is demoted to the rank of janitor). In 1887, a year before Bellamy, the American writer Anna Bowman Dodd published The Republic of the Future, a socialist dystopia set in New York in 2050, in which women and men are equal, children are reared by the state, machines handle all the work, and most people, having nothing else to do, spend much of their time at the gym, obsessed with fitness. Dodd describes this world as the very acme of dreariness. What is a dystopia? The gym. (Thats still true. In a 2011 episode of Black Mirror, life on earth in an energy-scarce future has been reduced to an interminable spin class.)

Utopians believe in progress; dystopians dont. They fight this argument out in competing visions of the future, utopians offering promises, dystopians issuing warnings. In 1895, in The Time Machine, H. G. Wells introduced the remarkably handy device of travelling through time by way of a clock. After that, time travel proved convenient, but even Wells didnt always use a machine. In his 1899 novel, When the Sleeper Awakes, his hero simply oversleeps his way to the twenty-first century, where he finds a world in which people are enslaved by propaganda, and helpless in the hands of the demagogue. Thats one problem with dystopian fiction: forewarned is not always forearmed.

Sleeping through the warning signs is another problem. I was asleep before, the heroine of The Handmaids Tale says in the new Hulu production of Margaret Atwoods 1986 novel. Thats how we let it happen. But what about when everyones awake, and there are plenty of warnings, but no one does anything about them? NK3, by Michael Tolkin (Atlantic), is an intricate and cleverly constructed account of the aftermath of a North Korean chemical attack; the NK3 of the title has entirely destroyed its victims memories and has vastly diminished their capacity to reason. This puts the novels characters in the same position as the readers of all dystopian fiction: theyre left to try to piece together not a whodunnit but a howdidithappen. Seth Kaplan, whod been a pediatric oncologist, pages through periodicals left in a seat back on a Singapore Airlines jet, on the ground at LAX. The periodicals, like the plane, hadnt moved since the plague arrived. It confused Seth that the plague was front-page news in some but not all of the papers, Tolkin writes. They still printed reviews of movies and books, articles about new cars, ways to make inexpensive costumes for Halloween. Everyone had been awake, but theyd been busy shopping for cars and picking out movies and cutting eyeholes in paper bags.

This springs blighted crop of dystopian novels is pessimistic about technology, about the economy, about politics, and about the planet, making it a more abundant harvest of unhappiness than most other heydays of downheartedness. The Internet did not stitch us all together. Economic growth has led to widening economic inequality and a looming environmental crisis. Democracy appears to be yielding to authoritarianism. Hopes, dashed is, lately, a long list, and getting longer. The plane is grounded, seat backs in the upright position, and we are dying, slowly, of stupidity.

Pick your present-day dilemma; theres a new dystopian novel to match it. Worried about political polarization? In American War (Knopf), Omar El Akkad traces the United States descent from gridlock to barbarism as the states of the former Confederacy (or, at least, the parts that arent underwater) refuse to abide by the Sustainable Future Act, and secede in 2074. Troubled by the new Jim Crow? Ben H. Winterss Underground Airlines (Little, Brown) is set in an early-twenty-first-century United States in which slavery abides, made crueller, and more inescapable, by the giant, unregulated slave-owning corporations that deploy the surveillance powers of modern technology, so that even escaping to the North (on underground airlines) hardly offers much hope, since free blacks in cities like Chicago live in segregated neighborhoods with no decent housing or schooling or work and its the very poverty in which they live that defeats arguments for abolition by hardening ideas about race. As the books narrator, a fugitive slave, explains, Black gets to mean poor and poor to mean dangerous and all the words get murked together and become one dark idea, a cloud of smoke, the smokestack fumes drifting like filthy air across the rest of the nation.

Radical pessimism is a dismal trend. The despair, this particular publishing season, comes in many forms, including the grotesque. In The Book of Joan (Harper), Lidia Yuknavitchs narrator, Christine Pizan, is forty-nine, and about to die, because shes living on a satellite orbiting the earth, where everyone is executed at the age of fifty; the wet in their bodies constitutes the colonys water supply. (Dystopia, here, is menopause.) Her body has aged: If hormones have any meaning left for any of us, it is latent at best. She examines herself in the mirror: I have a slight rise where each breast began, and a kind of mound where my pubic bone should be, but thats it. Nothing else of woman is left. Yuknavitchs Pizan is a resurrection of the medieval French scholar and historian Christine de Pisan, who in 1405 wrote the allegorical Book of the City of Ladies, and, in 1429, The Song of Joan of Arc, an account of the life of the martyr. In the year 2049, Yuknavitchs Pizan writes on her body, by a torturous process of self-mutilation, the story of a twenty-first-century Joan, who is trying to save the planet from Jean de Men (another historical allusion), the insane celebrity who has become its ruler. In the end, de Men himself is revealed to be not a man but what is left of a woman, with all the traces: sad, stitched-up sacks of flesh where breasts had once been, as if someone tried too hard to erase their existence. And a bulbous sagging gash sutured over and over where... life had perhaps happened in the past, or not, and worse, several dangling attempts at half-formed penises, sewn and abandoned, distended and limp.

Equal rights for women, emancipation, Reconstruction, civil rights: so many hopes, dashed; so many causes, lost. Pisan pictured a city of women; Lincoln believed in union; King had a dream. Yuknavitch and El Akkad and Winters unspool the reels of those dreams, and recut them as nightmares. This move isnt new, or daring; it is, instead, very old. The question is whether its all used up, as parched as a post-apocalyptic desert, as barren as an old woman, as addled as an old man.

A utopia is a planned society; planned societies are often disastrous; thats why utopias contain their own dystopias. Most early-twentieth-century dystopian novels took the form of political parables, critiques of planned societies, from both the left and the right. The utopianism of Communists, eugenicists, New Dealers, and Fascists produced the Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatins We in 1924, Aldous Huxleys Brave New World in 1935, Ayn Rands Anthem in 1937, and George Orwells 1984 in 1949. After the war, after the death camps, after the bomb, dystopian fiction thrived, like a weed that favors shade. A decreasing percentage of the imaginary worlds are utopias, the literary scholar Chad Walsh observed in 1962. An increasing percentage are nightmares.

Much postwar pessimism had to do with the superficiality of mass culture in an age of affluence, and with the fear that the banality and conformity of consumer society had reduced people to robots. I drive my car to supermarket, John Updike wrote in 1954. The way I take is superhigh,/A superlot is where I park it, /And Super Suds are what I buy. Supersudsy television boosterism is the utopianism attacked by Kurt Vonnegut in Player Piano (1952) and by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Cold War dystopianism came in as many flavors as soda pop or superheroes and in as many sizes as nuclear warheads. But, in a deeper sense, the mid-century overtaking of utopianism by dystopianism marked the rise of modern conservatism: a rejection of the idea of the liberal state. Rands Atlas Shrugged appeared in 1957, and climbed up the Times best-seller list. It has sold more than eight million copies.

The second half of the twentieth century, of course, also produced liberal-minded dystopias, chiefly concerned with issuing warnings about pollution and climate change, nuclear weapons and corporate monopolies, technological totalitarianism and the fragility of rights secured from the state. There were, for instance, feminist dystopias. The utopianism of the Moral Majority, founded in 1979, lies behind The Handmaids Tale (a book that is, among other things, an updating of Harriet Jacobss 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl). But rights-based dystopianism also led to the creation of a subgenre of dystopian fiction: bleak futures for bobby-soxers. Dystopianism turns out to have a natural affinity with American adolescence. And this, I think, is where the life of the genre got squeezed out, like a beetle burned up on an asphalt driveway by a boy wielding a magnifying glass on a sunny day. It sizzles, and then it smokes, and then it just lies there, dead as a bug.

Dystopias featuring teen-age characters have been a staple of high-school life since The Lord of the Flies came out, in 1954. But the genre only really took off in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, when distrust of adult institutions and adult authority flourished, and the publishing industry began producing fiction packaged for young adults, ages twelve to eighteen. Some of these books are pretty good. M. T. Andersons 2002 Y.A. novel, Feed, is a smart and fierce answer to the Dont Be Evil utopianism of Google, founded in 1996. All of them are characterized by a withering contempt for adults and by an unshakable suspicion of authority. The Hunger Games trilogy, whose first installment appeared in 2008, has to do with economic inequality, but, like all Y.A. dystopian fiction, its also addressed to readers who feel betrayed by a world that looked so much better to them when they were just a bit younger. I grew up a little, and I gradually began to figure out that pretty much everyone had been lying to me about pretty much everything, the high-school-age narrator writes at the beginning of Ernest Clines best-selling 2011 Y.A. novel, Ready Player One.

Lately, even dystopian fiction marketed to adults has an adolescent sensibility, pouty and hostile. Cory Doctorows new novel, Walkaway (Tor), begins late at night at a party in a derelict factory with a main character named Hubert: At twenty-seven, he had seven years on the next oldest partier. The story goes on in this way, with Doctorow inviting grownup readers to hang out with adolescents, looking for immortality, while supplying neologisms like spum instead of spam to remind us that were in a world thats close to our own, but weird. My father spies on me, the novels young heroine complains. Walkaway comes with an endorsement from Edward Snowden. Doctorows earlier novel, a Y.A. book called Little Brother, told the story of four teen-agers and their fight for Internet privacy rights. With Walkaway, Doctorow pounds the same nails with the same bludgeon. His walkaways are trying to turn a dystopia into a utopia by writing better computer code than their enemies. A pod of mercs and an infotech goon pwnd everything using some zeroday theyd bought from scumbag default infowar researchers is the sort of thing they say. They took over the drone fleet, and while we dewormed it, seized the mechas.

Every dystopia is a history of the future. What are the consequences of a literature, even a pulp literature, of political desperation? Its a sad commentary on our age that we find dystopias a lot easier to believe in than utopias, Atwood wrote in the nineteen-eighties. Utopias we can only imagine; dystopias weve already had. But what was really happening then was that the genre and its readers were sorting themselves out by political preference, following the same pathto the same ideological bunkersas families, friends, neighborhoods, and the news. In the first year of Obamas Presidency, Americans bought half a million copies of Atlas Shrugged. In the first month of the Administration of Donald (American carnage) Trump, during which Kellyanne Conway talked about alternative facts, 1984 jumped to the top of the Amazon best-seller list. (Steve Bannon is a particular fan of a 1973 French novel called The Camp of the Saints, in which Europe is overrun by dark-skinned immigrants.) The duel of dystopias is nothing so much as yet another place poisoned by polarized politics, a proxy war of imaginary worlds.

Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; its become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesnt ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesnt call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more. It appeals to both the left and the right, because, in the end, it requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination, asking only that you enjoy the company of people whose fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own. Left or right, the radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism has itself contributed to the unravelling of the liberal state and the weakening of a commitment to political pluralism. This isnt a story about war, El Akkad writes in American War. Its about ruin. A story about ruin can be beautiful. Wreckage is romantic. But a politics of ruin is doomed.

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A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction - The New Yorker

Jeff VanderMeer would like you to know that Mordthe vengeful, three-stories-tall flying bear that terrorizes the post-apocalyptic landscape of his new novel, Borneis not based on any living human in particular. No, not even that human. People have said, Mord is supposed to be Trump, VanderMeer says. And its like, No, no, Trump is much worse than Mord.

Yes, Borne is a book about a half-destroyed future city plunged into anarchy and decay after an unspecified environmental catastrophe. And the three-stories-tall flying bear that now rules it. And the alluringly strange biotech, both organic and synthetic, that a young scavenger named Rachel plucks from the bears fur, and sneaks home, and raises, after a fashion, as her own child. Rachel names this creature Borne; it is most frequently described as a cross between a squid and a sea anemone, though it quickly grows, and mutates, and sprouts a bunch of eyes, and learns to talk and read, and starts to mimic different forms, different people, different facets of humanity.

Parts of this work as a grim metaphor for our current national climate; parts of this, mercifully, do not, though maybe itd be cooler if they did. To wit, at one point the giant bear fights a giant shark, sort of: It resembled more an iguana than a fish, with a gaping bite, an off-center lunge that seemed to admit to missing limbs, VanderMeer writes. By now Mord has raised an army of smaller but similarly lethal surrogate bears, and escalated a further-destructive war with a mysterious adversary known only as the Magician. He also has unfinished business with a nefarious institution known only as the Company, which created Mord and Borne and the environmental catastrophe, too.

You might call all this dystopian or science fiction or simply weird. Of those three, VanderMeer might favor weird, actually. Hed likely prefer that you see Borne as a story about love, and parenting, and climate change, and hard-fought hope that neither succumbs to the dystopia nor places blind, unreasonable faith in some future utopia. But he probably wouldnt lead with any of that in describing the book to a stranger at the airport, and neither would you.

Basically, the novel came to me as this image of this woman reaching out to this sea-anemone-like creature that reminded her of her past, he tells me. And then I realizedit just came to methat it was tangled in the fur of a bear. And then it was like, how large the bear was. And then the bear flew off. And I was like, Am I gonna keep that in there or not?

VanderMeer is calling in from a stop on the already monthlong, coast-to-coast Borne press tour, a deluge of readings and panels and autographs and mildly goofy photo ops. He has a slight cold, and apologizes for it; his deep voice nonetheless has the sharp but soothing lilt of a professional reader/panelist/interview subject. He has thick black-framed glasses, a salt-and-pepper goatee, a cat named Neo, and biceps just large enough to discourage anyone from giving him shit about it. As a kid, he considered studying to be a marine biologist, but instead hes been a writer for the past three decades or so, and a mainstream-sensation-sort-of writer for only three years and change. He credits a childhood partially spent on the islands of Fiji with giving him both a vast appreciation of the natural world and the vast imagination to think far beyond it.

He is eager to confound expectations, sidestep pigeonholes, resist classifications. Hes one of the biggest and best and, yes, weirdest emerging novelists of the past few years, in part because his fiction can evoke disturbing aspects of our current reality but still be stranger than anyones elses fiction. He makes harrowing things sound beautiful, and vice versa. He imbues fantastical scenarios with poignant, real-world gravitas, in ways that only make them seem more fantastical. And most importantly, he keeps the giant flying bear in there.

I actually kinda find science fiction to be a pejorative, to be absolutely honest, only because I dont feel like I really write it, VanderMeer says. But there were only so many ways a mere mortaleven a well-read mere mortalcould describe his Southern Reach trilogy, which beguiled and terrified and confused a ton of people, some sci-fi-conversant but many not, upon its slow-motion release by big-shot publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014.

Annihilation came first, then Authority, then Acceptance, the releases staggered by a few months, the classic trilogy form and cool paperback-cover images pleasing to the eye, the cumulative effect harder to describe to anybody, anywhere. After Id finished Annihilationwhich Ex Machina director Alex Garland is now making into a 2018 feature film starring Natalie Portmanmy wife asked me what it was about, and I failed so miserably to explain it that she almost got legitimately angry at me.

When I tell VanderMeer this, he takes the half-compliment, but also patiently supplies the description: If Im at an airport, and someone strikes up a casual conversation, and they ask, You wrote Annihilation, so whats it about?, I say, Well, its about an expedition into a pristine wilderness thats actually kind of strange, where somethings gone wrongtheyre trying to figure out whats going on. That doesnt really sound any different than any number of thrillers, in a way.

He wants to unsettle, but he also wants to be understood. Which makes Annihilation an uncanny beast, inviting plenty of surface comparisonsto Lost, for examplebut subverting expectations, scuttling grand theories, withholding easy answers. The Southern Reach trilogys plot, crudely stated, combines dystopia with utopia: a remote and sparsely populated piece of land (inspired, at least, by the weirder parts of Florida) has been abruptly transformed, via some cataclysmic event, into Area X, a feral and beautiful and treacherous landscape, untouched by pollution. There are two lighthouses, and a topographical anomaly that resembles a winding tower plunged fully into the earth, and various moaning beasts that seem partially human, but mostly not.

A nefarious government institution known only as the Southern Reach sends small expeditions into this place, seeking the same answers as the reader; Annihilation mostly tells the story of the 12th expedition, consisting of four women described only as a biologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a psychologist. Fascinating and inexplicable and horrifying things happen, with enough intrigue to launch thousands of subreddits. But VanderMeer amps up both the fascination and the horror by keeping us in the vivid, all-consuming dark.

I really firmly believe that theres a lot of theories out there that kind of fall apart, because they want to give you all the answers, but they give you answers that the characters could never possibly have found out, he says. The characters have eureka momentsits just bullshit. At the end of the day, I was literally writing about what its like to encounter something thats beyond human comprehension. So the idea of explaining it all seemed like a cop-out.

The trilogy structure only further clouds the issue: Book 2, Authority, shifts the action entirely away from Area X, exploring instead the internal bureaucracy of the Southern Reach parked right outside the nebulous border, full of petty office politics and conspiracy-theorist intrigues. Its a perspective shift as abrupt and polarizing as, say, The Wires Season 2 jump to the docks, all but abandoning many of the first seasons most beloved settings and characters. But here, too, VanderMeer meant to evoke both the unknown and the known.

Quite honestly, when I was on the Annihilation tour, one of the things I was most happy about, even though it was just horrifying, was that someone high up in the EPA came to my D.C. reading, and told me that Authority was not only accurate, in terms of the bureaucracy, but that it was one of the funniest books shed ever read, he recalls. And I did mean a lot of that to be partially funny, because it was based on my own experiences with the state of Floridas bureaucracy, when I was a contractor. But that was a little horrifying.

VanderMeer was born in Pennsylvania and raised partially in Fiji, before settling in Tallahassee, Florida. His father was an entomologist and research chemist; his mother was a biological illustrator and an artist. A perfect origin story for someone whose job now involves inventing feral, pristine wildernesses. (The Florida connectionwhere the landscape is a little stranger, and thanks to climate change, under a more visceral and immediate threatreminds me of Miami native Karen Russells 2011 novel Swamplandia!, though that one prefers alligators to bears.)

The Southern Reach saga was his breakthrough after a nearly 30-year writing career full of novels, short-story collections, and various anthologies, most of which he compiled alongside his wife, Ann VanderMeer, a renowned editor and a huge influence on Jeffs own fiction. (Their collaborations include Best American Fantasy, the pirate-themed collection Fast Ships, Black Sails, The Time Travelers Almanac, and The New Weird.) He even has a previous trilogy, the Ambergris series, whose installments came out via three different publishers; VanderMeer cites FSGs unified and mass-market approach as a major factor in the projects huge success.

That success is qualifiable both within his usual genre and far beyond it. Annihilation won the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award as well, huge prizes in the sci-fi and horror realms. But most of those victors dont get Natalie Portman film adaptations, or verdant praise from mainstream outlets like GQ or The New Yorker, which in 2015 hailed Jeff as the The Weird Thoreau.

Theres that word again. VanderMeer regards weird or uncanny fiction as a long and honorable spectrum, stretching from Franz Kafka to Polish polymath Bruno Schulz to British fairy-tale titan Angela Carter. Definitely weird has been bandied about as a pejorative, too, he says. And one thing early on is I realized I was gonna have to just ignore thatthat there were gonna be some people who were always gonna be saying, Youre a little too weird. Kind of like, trying to use it to squash your creativity.

Bornereleased in April and earning VanderMeer more lavish praisehas already been optioned for its own movie. (He doesnt seem too stressed about how his work will translate to film: I havent read the screenplay, I have no control over casting, no control over anything else, he told Wired late last year when asked if the Annihilation movie will retain the books forceful ecological message. What I can control is that I have the increased visibility to make a direct difference in terms of talking about these issues to audiences.) On his website, he hints that his third trilogy, an upcoming young-adult series whose first volume is tentatively titled Jonathan Lambshead and the Golden Sphere, has already attracted similar interest. This is The Guy right now. The Weird Guy, sure. His imagined universes are grotesque and gorgeous, spooky and utterly singular. But they are also, somehow, universal.

Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, who now manage a power-couple mini-empire of anthologies, conferences, and teen-writing workshops, first met as long-distance colleagues, as fellow underground literati with a taste for the macabre and otherworldly. Shed first reached out to him in the pre-internet era to ask for advice on starting a magazine. We had a correspondence for about a year before we finally met in person, Ann tells me. We lived in different cities, so there was also that. But I have boxes and boxes of our correspondence, and I think both of us kinda miss that a little bit, that we dont have that letter-writing back-and-forth anymore. Emails are just not the sameyou just cant hear it. So, we do occasionally write letters to each other.

Not lately, probably: The VanderMeers are only now emerging from the Borne book tour, a whimsical jaunt with a traveling-roadshow vibe, what with the stuffed animals and giant-bear woodcut. I think Im good, Ann reports. I havent killed my husband yet, and weve been on the road 31 days, and we got six more to go.

All of Jeffs novels are dedicated to Ann; part of their marital lore is that she first read an early draft of Annihilation while the couple drove from Tallahassee to Orlando for a conference, making her a captive audience, but him a captive artist, too. Normally, when he hands me something, he leaves the house, Ann says. He neednt have worried. I was completely and totally blown away. I had never read anything like that before in my life. Which is saying something, for a couple with a steampunk collection in their CV.

They complete each other, is the less science-fictional way to put it. In approaching either Jeffs work or a third partys, Ann explains, I think one of the differences is that Im looking at it from a readers point of view, and Im looking at how a reader is going to connect to different things, and focusing a lot on that reception. Whereas, a lot of times, when my husband is looking at fiction, hes looking at what the writer is doing, the beauty of their language, the use of the words, the turn of phrases.

In the case of Borne, that made Ann more a big-picture consultant than a line editor. As I was writing it, I would tell her about certain situations and character relationships, Jeff says. And we would kind of hash it out, and Id be like, This is what Im thinking about, and Im wondering if she had any thoughts about what it might actually be about.

What they both thought Borne might really be aboutdespite the giant flying bear, and weird biotech creature, and sense of apocalyptic doomwas parenting. Jeff cites his stepdaughter, Erina researcher and author focused on environmental issuesas a major influence on the novel. When a young Borne calls a weasel a long mouse, thats a classic Erin line.

The books plot is significantly more straightforward than the Southern Reach trilogy: Borne and Rachel grow to tentatively understand and even love each other, but Borne also grows unmanageable, and various cataclysms, emotional and otherwise, are inevitable. The mood is vibrant but stern, yearning but bleak. I dont know, it just happened, Rachel says, trying to explain to Borne how things got this way. Everything everywhere collapsed. We didnt try hard enough. We were preyed upon. We had no discipline. We didnt try the right things at the right time. We cared but didnt do. Too many people, too little space.

The book evokes plenty of pitch-dark fictional timelines, from The Road to The Handmaids Tale, but Jeff, who is very much on the record as anti-Trump, is careful not to cite recent history as his sole inspiration. Weve been living in a dystopia for a long time, and Trump has just exposed that, he says. So you know, some people have felt it less, but that doesnt mean that it wasnt a dystopia.

Borne ends on a hopeful note, but not exactly a triumphant one: Jeff stresses the need for any optimism to be hard-won. What I dont want is, I think if you hand your book to someone whos displaced by climate change now, for them to go, Oh, this reads like utopia, you really fucked up, or Youre really just living in a bubble. So there is hope in the book, but it comes at a great cost.

But its the more sentimental Borne-Rachel conversations that mark Borne as uniqueas another phase of VanderMeers ongoing breakthrough. The moment that hit hardest for me is a Rachel realization that comes too late: Id been teaching him the whole time, with every last little thing I did, even when I didnt realize I was teaching him. Most parents come to that jarring conclusion, albeit usually under less dire circumstances.

Ann cites a different passage, one that brings herand, she says, Jeffto tears even now, when he pulls it out at readings. Its when Rachel first brings Borne back outside and shows him the ruined landscape in full: the dilapidated and destroyed buildings, the poisoned river. Which Borne finds beautiful, and causes Rachel to find beautiful again, too: He made me rethink even simple words like disgusting or beautiful.

Thats Jeffs job, too. That was just so strong for me, because I feel like that explains how another person can change you, Ann says. How they can just totally rock your world and turn things around in such a positive and beautiful way.

These novels are not Twin Peaks monuments to inexplicable psychedelic confusionthe emotions are painfully lucid, even if the logistics arent. VanderMeer offers mesmerizing new things to look at, but also new ways to look at the old ones. When people ask Jeff that question about, Is there hope?, I always think of that scene, Ann says. Because if you can have such a strong emotional change in somebody, and its that whole feeling of loveI just feel like theres no better way to describe what that feels like than what I see in that scene. Ive read a lot of books that talk about love, that try to show you love, but I have never, ever seen it expressed exactly that way before. The VanderMeers dont mind if you find all this a little weird, just so long as you understand that to them, its also true.

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The Darkest (and Coolest) Timeline of Jeff VanderMeer - The Ringer (blog)

1984 and the leering face of a devil roars exultantly as it smashes through the wall of an old English church, drawing upon the mounting forces of turmoil and unrest fermenting in the strife-torn countryside in order to gain power and strength. 1975 and the British Isles have reverted to a de-industrialised fear-strewn land where outsiders and unbelievers are viewed with suspicion and hostility as self-proclaimed witchfinders seek out those who would question this return to a prelapsarian idyll. And there's 1972, the metal corridors of an offshore sea fort clanging discordantly to the scuffled, wheezing pursuit between dreaded ocean-borne intruders and island dwellers desperate to defend what they view as rightfully theirs. Fearful episodes resonating down the years like folk tales.

If you grew up in the blighted United Kingdom between the 1950s-1980s, then these images and the sounds which not only accompanied but enabled them may well be imprinted onto your memories to the point that they've formed part of your own consciousness. Sound generated from within the television to the point that it formed a crucial link between ourselves and the screen, way beyond notions of mere incidental music. In the 1975 BBC children's drama The Changes, it is sound, in the form of a hyper-pressurised all-enveloping electronic scream courtesy of the Radiophonic Workshop's Paddy Kingsland, which signals the fall of Britain back into a devastating yet almost welcomed Dark Age.

We also have sound houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds, and their generation. We have harmonies, which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. These words form part of Francis Bacon's 17th century text The New Utopia and were utilised by Radiophonic Workshop co-founder Daphne Oram in 1957 as aspirational desire for the production of experimental electronic sound worlds within the BBC's output. Sixty years later, with utopian notions further from view than at any time since Oram's hopeful manifesto, the Radiophonic Workshop here release a new body of work based around five improvised pieces which also take their titles from Bacon's poetic future vision. The album credits the line-up as being Mark Ayres and Paddy Kingsland along with Martyn Ware and Steve Jones. It's strangely odd and disillusioning to think of the Workshop being just another group as opposed to government funded collective of isolated workers researching the limits of sound and music under the guise of light entertainment.

The lovingly rendered packaging for Burials in Several Earths very much plays up to the Workshop's influence as indirect progenitors of hauntological tendencies within strands of musical and cultural thinking throughout the 21st century thus far. Houses crumble under swirls of murky vortices and analogue synthesisers wash up as flotsam amongst wrecked ships on rocky shores. Yet, for all the imagery of one era's decay superimposed upon another, the music chimes with clarity and freshness reminiscent of Cluster at their most benevolently aqueous and formless. The five extended pieces, filtering waves of ambient shingle with fragmented piano patterns and sudden outbursts of Gilmour-esque guitar wail, are clearly intended to demonstrate the Workshop's abilities once freed from their duty as public servants to provide memorable themes. Sometimes, as on 'Things Buried in Water', the desire to break from these past boundaries can result in elongated passages of aimless meandering. But, considering the BBC's short-sighted disbanding of the Workshop in 1998, you can forgive the surviving members and acolytes occasional wish to drift and wander down blind alleys at will. While there is the odd lapse into grisly power-riffing, the overall mood is sedate if haunted. It has the same effect as dormant memories or lingering dreams, seemingly placid and harmless but then suddenly coiling itself around you.

Listening to Burials in Several Earths is like encountering background music for 2017 which was conceived forty years ago. There is certainly nothing here which could date it beyond the mid 1980s. But future and past, reality and fiction, seem to have completely lost any meaning in this present day. Pink Floyd, once counter-cultural totems, are feted with a heritage exhibition yet the real counter-culture sounds were being broadcast into children's television programmes and wildlife documentaries. Perhaps this means we are all the counter-culture now; we carry its inheritance within us and must pay heed to its warnings and urges. The sound houses become empty mausoleums as we hurtle further away from that utopian ideal. The future crumbles into dust while the past traps us in a perpetual time loop.

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Burials In Several Earths Euan Andrews , May 25th, 2017 07:28 - The Quietus

What do Apple, Google, and Facebook have in common with the Californian hippie movement of the 1960s? A new exhibition at Londons Design Museum explains the relationship between Silicon Valleys eco-system and Californias freewheeling past.

California: Designing Freedom is organised around five themes, considering how individuals can control how they see, make, speak, travel, and share, using technology. Presented partly in a series of Geodesic domes the lattice-shelled architectural structures favoured by Californian communes in the 1960s and 1970s the curators Justin McGuirk and Brendan McGetrick demonstrate how the 1960s counterculture movements in the Golden State have inspired the ethos of its major corporations up to today, with the belief that technology can equip the individual with the tools for a better, easier, and self-sufficient life.

Rainbow flag, by Gilbert Baker, 1978

Through objects, archival publications, documents, and even LSD blotting paper, the benevolence of that ideology is unwavering. Stewart Brands 1968 Whole Earth Catalogue, a precursor to Wikipedia, for example, was an early attempt to democratise access to information; a home kit for genetic engineering is another invention that shares the intent of giving the public the tools to create change for themselvesalbeit more problematic when put in to practical use.

Although this exhibition is a buoyant celebration of California as the heartland of pioneering design and technology, its not all gimmicks, gizmos and gadgets. In 1995, two academics at the nearby University of Westminster published an essay that also probed at the politics of the Silicon Valley, now visualised in this exhibition.

Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameroons The Californian Ideology pointed out the contradictions in the idealistic impulse in Dotcom neoliberalism in Silicon Valley. The media theorists argued that the paradoxical mix of New Left and New Right beliefs in California has in fact lead to what Adam Curtis later referred to as the feeling that we are helpless components in a global system. The more pernicious consequences of technological advances in our advance capitalist systemfrom social immobility, to hacking and terrorismcant be ignored.

With some of the very recent new technologies now at our disposition, on display here: Snapchat Spectacles, Amazon Echo, FitBit and, Waymo (Googles self-driving car, seen for the first time in the UK) the question is left hanging over the techno-utopia. From functional to fantastical, youre left wondering whether technology has really liberated us, or made us slaves to the machine.

DESIGN MUSEUM, TECHNOLOGY, AMERICAN DESIGN, GOOGLE, APPLE, LONDON EXHIBITIONS

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Tracing California's techno-utopia, from function to fantasy ... - wallpaper.com

There was a time when people were drawn to Colorado for the abundance of farming opportunities and the utopian possibilities of new settlements rather than the craft beers and high-octane thrills. The makeup of 17th-century entrepreneurs looked a bit differently than the microbrew hustlers and Gor-Tex-clad athletes of today. But where cowboys used to herd the 300,000 buffaloes along the Front Range, a fleet of road bikes now keeps tabs on the plains back roads.

James Herman, rodeo chairman of Colorados largest rodeo, the Greeley Stampede, is convinced that these two cultures the new urban-dwelling mountain lovers and the old-school open space lovers need not be mutually exclusive. As the Greeley Stampede nears its 100-year anniversary, Hermans mission is to use the event as a platform for connecting the past and the present

As Colorado gets bigger and bigger, we feel like were losing some of our Western heritage, he says. So, [the rodeo] is a good way to preserve it.

Since its inception in 1922, the Greeley Stampede has drawn in crowds to experience, honor and learn about many of the states founding traditions. Over the course of this years 12-day festival, hundreds of thousands of spectators will come from every corner of the globe. Dozens of classic rodeo events, from bull riding to demolition derbies to steer wrestling, will ensue. Six late-night arena concerts will sound long past dark. Drinks will be had. Miss Rodeo Colorado 2017 will be named.

Its nonstop action and excitement. Good wholesome family fun, Herman says.

I always say its Colorados biggest party, adds John DeWitt, the rodeos general chairman.

Over the past century, however, a chorus of near-misses has split up the Stampedes legacy of joyful refrains; the Womens Christian Temperance Union, a devastating fire, a stampede that hospitalized 11 people, the 2000s economic recession, and even a cowboys death all tried to foil the rodeos success to no avail. Over the past 96 years, the rodeo has stayed strong, and continues to build upon its mission to celebrate and preserve Western heritage.

The Stampedes roots trace back to the late 1800s, when the town of Greeley dedicated a Fourth of July celebration to its super-star potato farmers who helped bring economic success to the newly-established settlement.

The town of Greeley itself was the product of one New Yorkers imagination. In 1841, Horace Greeley had just founded the New York Tribune, a weekly paper that once boasted the highest-circulation in the country. As the Civil War dragged on, he grew obsessed with developing the West and fiercely encouraged those on the Eastern seaboard to migrate toward sunset. Eventually he popularized the phrase, Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.

Five years after the Civil War ended, Greeley sent his agriculture editor Nathan Meeker on a reconnaissance mission with orders to find the perfect spot to set up a utopian agriculture colony. Greeleys vision incorporated a group of highly-educated and pious families, involved in sophisticated farming systems, collectively forging a new America.

Meeker scoured the Front Range and eventually settled in the swath of land nestled between the Poudre and the Platte Rivers. He planned for Greeleys community to maximize the available irrigation technology, and he started building ditches for farms. He also immediately broke ground on a school. On Dec. 4, 1869, Meeker wrote Call for a Western Community, a letter that Greeley published in the New York Tribune to announce that applications were open for those interested in the utopia. Meeker received over 3,000 letters in response, of which 324 originals are now kept in the Greeley History Museum.

In the end, Meeker chose 700 families and directed them to the Rocky Mountain outpost that he continued to develop. In April of 1870, the first members began to trickle in: the original adventurous, risk-taking transplants that founded Weld County. It would be another six years before Colorado became an official state.

Predictably, farming became the cornerstone that supported and eventually succeeded Greeleys utopian vision. Aside from a massive production of potatoes and cattle, Greeley was also making 25 percent of the nations sugar by 1920. The town continued its Fourth of July community celebrations to honor the farmers and their families, and in 1922, with 2,500 people in attendance, the yearly festival was officially christened the Greeley Spud Rodeo.

In the near-century since, the one-day event has grown to span 12 days, and its attendance has multiplied a hundredfold. Last year, DeWitt estimates more than 250,000 people passed through the festival, some flying in from countries across the world. The name has changed a handful of times, transitioning from the Spud Rodeo to Greeleys Rocky Mountain Stampede, to the Greeley Independence Stampede, and finally, in 2006, settling at todays name: simply the Greeley Stampede.

Our goal is to expose as many people and as many different cultures as possible to this Western heritage. Rodeo and agriculture are a huge part of our past, DeWitt says. Although he didnt grow up in rodeo culture himself, hes immersed himself in it over the last seven years, starting with helping the Stampede organize its music and entertainment packages. Now, the family-centered culture, high-energy people and supportive community that hes found through rodeo are the most influential and positive parts of his life. This gives him the confidence that others can come into the rodeo experience blind and be transformed in the same way.

In recent years, the Stampede has initiated a big push to broaden its scope of rodeo and attract families or individuals who may not have been interested in the archetypal macho-cowboy-riding-angry-bull trope. The music that the Stampede organizes is one of its big initiatives, and thanks to DeWitt, its become one of their most attractive elements.

My goal is to reach out to the young, the old, the foreign I dont care who you are, DeWitt says. He wants the diversity in the Front Range to be reflected at the Stampede, and he believes the concert series stands the best chance of broadening attendee demographics by appealing to a larger pool of people.

We have two days this year that we have devoted stages to nothing but Hispanic music, he says. In addition to this, theyll have headliners like the Barenaked Ladies, Toby Keith, Chase Rice and numerous other musicians to fill in the 50-plus music acts over the course of the festival. The organizers are hoping this draws in new spectators, getting them to the event, and then letting the rodeo bug take over, says DeWitt.

The Stampede is still ripe with old-timey cowboy culture and events, while other non-traditional events include the RV demo derby. We sell that out every year. Well have five to six RVs in an arena just crashing into one another, DeWitt says. Its a crowd favorite for sure.

By the end of the Stampede, both DeWitt and Herman hope that people who have taken the chance to visit understand that the rodeo wouldnt be what it is, even in its new-age-meets-old-age glory, without the legacy of the countys founders. Thats an integral part of the event. The Greeley area has such a unique Western history within its agriculture community, Herman says. The rodeo is a huge community event, and we have such a great community. Thats what this whole ordeal comes down to. Lets celebrate that.

Read more from the original source:

The Greeley Stampede - Boulder Weekly

Its also another moving example of the impactful mark that Matthew Rankin can make, in a few minutes using fewer materials than many. His last historical short, Mynarski Death Plummet, packed an emotional punch using a synesthetic technique which The Tesla World Light electrically replicates.

I think of my style, such as it is, as a synthesizing, Rankin explained to Cartoon Brew by phone. Mynarski Death Plummet used hand processing to tell a story. The Tesla World Light does the same using early 20th century avant-garde abstraction. I like using the vocabulary of abstract art and animation for a narrative purpose.

While his previous shorts, like the rapid-fire Cattle Call (co-directed with Mike Maryniuk) and the NFB-produced The Radical Expeditions of Walter Boudreau, played with the fringes of sound, The Tesla World Light hits you right in the eyes with light. Its history, its technique, and its utopian promise, which remain topical for times as deeply troubled as ours.

Cartoon Brew: Your Twitter bio says you live somewhere between slapstick and utopia, which seems fitting because Nikola Tesla was something of a slapstick utopian.

Matthew Rankin: Theres something very romantic about Tesla. He was an idealistic scientist and he was convinced what he was doing was going to save the world. He had a grandiose vision of the future, as did many early 20th century utopians. But I think Tesla ranks among the most grandiose.

Of course, that coexists with other facets of Tesla. There is a photograph of him reading a book, as electric thunderbolts fire around him. There is an element of the absurd in Tesla, and I like that contrast.

Your film begins with Tesla on his deathbed, begging for a loan from J.P. Morgan. Today, Elon Musks company named for Tesla is scaling up solarized electrification. What do you think Tesla would say about this embrace of his vision?

Matthew Rankin: Its interesting, because Tesla himself wasnt that into business, insofar that it could fund his work. He had so many ideas, and he had to get them all out, as people grew impatient with him. And not only that, he was idealistic that energy and electricity could be free for everyone on the planet, which is at odds with the capitalist imperative. Of course, a giant company called Tesla today is somewhat ironic, but at the same time, if I understand the operation, its long-term goal is to reduce dependence on fossil fuels to take back electricity. That is a great homage to Nikola Tesla; it is a way of asserting human freedom through energy.

And those are Teslas actual letters; everything in the film is drawn from something he wrote or said. The letters to Morgan are absolutely fascinating; I found them in the Library of Congress. Theyre much longer and more detailed than what is in the film, but they are beautiful, poetic, heartbreaking, soul-withering, desperate pleas for help. You see that he has all these ideas, but the world is just not interested. It is very beautiful and sad, and reminds me very much of abstract art. I feel like there is a certain similitude between an abstract futurist like Tesla and his contemporaries in the art world.

How did you use Teslas history as a launch window into your abstract technique?

Matthew Rankin: Its about trying to engage in feeling and texture. There is so much about the human experience that resists the historical record, because there is only so much of the past that you can measure and record. So the vocation of the historian is somewhat bereft of this information. What is the history of our most extreme emotions? How can this be documented? That is more the vocation of the artist than the historian, so I try to get at the abstract feelings that may have inhabited the past. Of course, its an imaginative engagement. Its my interpretation.

You chose to play with light to illuminate a scientist who saw, and felt, light like few others.

Matthew Rankin: Light was our raw material. I had done a bit of experimentation with light painting, which is a great technique I associate with experimental photography. You open the exposure and move the light through. Adapting it to animation was very hard but really fun; I think I burned through 15,000 sparklers in the process of making this film. We also used fluorescent lamps, flashlights, light-emitting diodes, and more. There is a shot of Tesla reading in front of his Tesla coil, which is breathing and vibrating with light, that we made using a constructed windmill with a row of lights that could be changed and moved. We spun the windmill while the exposure was open, which created brilliant rings of light.

The inspiration for much of this is an unbelievable photographic archive of Tesla, most of which use these long exposures and silver emulsions. And, of course, the thing about shooting on 16-millimeter film is that it is light. What you are actually having is an encounter with light, rather than an encounter with numbers. When you see black, it is an absence of light, not more numbers.

Youve spoken about using formalism for abstract art, but its handmade imperfection mirrors Teslas vision, which was incongruous with his period.

Matthew Rankin: Its tricky, because we live in an age that has been described as anti-utopian. Utopian visions of the future, which were so much a part of how people encountered their world at the beginning of the 20th century, have all but vanished. Theyve all kind of fallen apart, although there are some that have been hanging on. But I think its a hard era in which to be a utopian. I have a lot of idealistic longing, but I dont have a great deal of idealistic conviction. I think there is a difference.

What about Teslas conviction that he had fallen in love with a pigeon?

Matthew Rankin: That was based on an interview Tesla gave; he really did say it. The climactic scene when the bird explodes with electricity is my interpretation of what Tesla himself described as the birds death. He said a light, more powerful than any he had ever created in his laboratory, started to burst out of the birds eyeballs. The interview was conducted near the end of Teslas life, when he was kind of unstable, so one can imagine his testimony was given through that prism. But I choose to believe it, and I tried to play it as earnest as I could.

It has a comic but historical weight, given its basis in testimony. It also gives you more room to play with symbolism and light.

Matthew Rankin: Thats true. The other light that plays a role in this, according to my own diagnosis, is that Tesla probably had a form of synesthesia, which is where your encounters with the world become visually manifest. Tesla claimed that when he experienced extreme emotions like love, fear, and shock, his eyes would become filled with abstract, luminous forms. The film plays with that.

Hes a great subject for you, because your work has that synesthetic impact, which makes it distinctive. I can quickly tell if Im watching a Matthew Rankin film.

Matthew Rankin: I feel like I live with many cinematic ghosts, hovering over everything that I do. I think of my style, such as it is, as a synthesizing. My last film, Mynarski Death Plummet, used hand processing to tell a story; The Tesla World Light does the same using early 20th century avant-garde abstraction. I like using the vocabulary of abstract art and animation for a narrative purpose. I love experimental film, but I also have a desire to build characters and create emotions.

So my work is about seeing how far I can go to tell a story through the prism of visual abstraction. I do think that visual language can have enormous emotional power. I dont want to say that it can too often be confined or limited by pure formalism, which I also love, but I do want to explore how much emotional information I can infuse.

So how do you follow a short about a dying scientist in love with an electric bird?

Matthew Rankin: I just shot a feature film called The 20th Century, which is a historical live-action drama about a former prime minister of Canada who fell in love with a shoe. [Laughs] Im moving on to inanimate objects.

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It's Hard to Be A Utopian: Matthew Rankin On His New Film 'The Tesla World Light' - Cartoon Brew