From the blog of Lebbeus Woods comes an entry entitled “Utopia Redux” which features a series of images by Cooper Union student Daniel Meriador. They depict a strange and silent technological architecture of humankind, juxtaposed, or floating whimsically, against degraded or hostile-seeming landscapes. Using photo-montage, the images are disarmingly simple, and almost iconographic. The typical elements of classic science fiction imagery are there, the vastness of the landscape and the tiny, solitary, contemplative human figure. Woods points out the ambiguity with regard to whether the images are a vision of …

Across Plastic Futures, we have often discussed what the future looks like (or, more precisely, how it is imagined and depicted). In Plastic Futures 1, for instance, we noticed that images of the future (often sci-fi) quite often involve grandiose scenes of enormity in which people become minute figures. So, in Plastic Futures 2 with the next group of participants, I had them all equipped with little white 1:98 scale model people, who became subjects for many photographs in 1:1 scaled scenes. This was carried through to the exhibition …

“The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness.” — J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come (2006).

“But even before entering the Casino, we were aware that we were no longer in the world of quotidian politeness. The first task was to pass through the borderzone, out on …

A sort of reply to Nicholas’s post on the Lucas Arts: Fracture terra-forming computer game.  There’s been a lot of talk about how much video games and cinema (especially science fiction) have influenced wider design culture.  With advancements in our ability to represent ‘reality’ digitally, the games and animation industry has also influenced the development of many of the software applications used by designers and architects.  We’ve also talked about different scenarios of the future, be it dystopian or utopian or somewhere in the middle.  This 2005 article by …

In yet another onto-it post (from 2006) by Geoff Manaugh on his BLDGBLOG he throws up some enticing potentials about future aeroplanes printed out of plastic and the imagined potential of bio-printing.
But where it gets really interesting for me, is where he starts to discuss how contemporary life is slipping into sci-fi, and “Science-fiction and social realism will become one and the same thing.” Becoming increasingly future-focussed (reading between the lines) is valuable for the way it sparks, or encourages imaginative, open exploration of ideas. He yawns at much of …

Trecia’s last post reminded me that I’ve been meaning to share with you a short story by Isaac Asimov called “The Last Question” that I read when I was a kid.
It seems pretty dated in many ways (it was written in 1956) but there is an underlying theme in it that has stuck with me. I’ve always thought of it as somehow reassuring if a little cheesy.
I don’t want to spoil it for anyone so if you want to read the whole story you can find it here: …