Ray Kurzweil’s infamous predictions have propelled him to a cultural status of technological muse. In our fast-thinking, always-upgrading culture, Kurzweil stands atop the steepest incline of progress, emanating the most mind-boggling visions of “that’s our future.”
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Well… we made it. 2020 is in the past. There was a pandemic, the virus. It is convenient to smirk and disengage, checking out into mind-numbing spaces of withdrawal. Let me click into a new void of internet exploration. Let me drift away into a new season. Three days become three months becomes a year. Do I still pay rent?
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Solarpunk flies upon simultaneous internet currents, growing in separate biospheres and concocting a lush new movement. Part fictional literary scene, large part aesthetical fantasy hashtag and also a DIY home and garden blogging niche, the genre unifies in a reblogged hope for the near future.
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Perhaps no man of the twentieth century embodied the wholesomeness of the universe more thoroughly than Buckminster Fuller. Inventor, architect, mathematician, spiritualist, educator, author and futurist, Fuller led a famously frantic life.
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Burial is an artist capturing withering urban decay. It’s wounded, electronic post-industrial, and even post-modern, eschewing the system of dopamine hitting drops and fist-pounding exhilaration. Although a forebear of dubstep, the secretive South Londoner would never perform on a stage.
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Neil Postman laid it all out in 1992’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.
A technopoly is a society that accepts data as fact, science as God and sees national progress measured by the rate of technological expansion. Satiated with technophiles, shielded by the benefits of innovation and ignorantly unaware of the threats. The harm in a technophilic culture does not arise from the technology itself.
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Perhaps no one’s artistic trauma manifests more materially than the work of Amy Karle. Born to a biochemist and pharmacist, Amy grew up with a rare and dangerous genetic disorder known as aplasia cutis, the missing of skin on the scalp.
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A few years ago, esteemed photographer Dan Tobin Smith opened a website calling for Kipple. He asked the public to send him everything forlorn, decomposed, without a purpose. Instead of an apartment floor, he covered his studio with such materials.