Archive for the ‘James Soane and Christopher Ash’ Category

The world is not enough

Saturday, September 9th, 2006

And now Mr Bond….it’s time to….read another stastistic. While facinating, engaging and articulate after 2 days the Biennale has become an encyclopaedia. We are in some kind of Neo-Victorian era of cataloging and collecting - facts, stastistics, images and Data. It has become a world of data-escapism. Echo city, Eco city, Ego city. In the words of Big Brother - YOU DECIDE. The question becomes one of ownership and editing…curating is the new architecture. A streamlined video, a collage city, a list of numbers…a collection of fragments. The politics of design reside in the dialogue between individuals/the collective/the state and the global. A new age is emerging - we try to understand it - but even with new technologies, glamourous graphics and art-school strategies - the issues remain the same - the tension between order and chaos, domination versus free thinking, the virtual over the experiential. Five years after 2001 we are still searching for the future - and it seems to be as much in the past, in the cities that have been and that are - rather that in the abstraction of a future. We are asked, perhaps, just to look. To learn and by trying to understand the MACRO scale we may, just , be able to make a difference on the MICRO.

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