utopian cities-programmed societies

Lectures June 26, 2019

 

utopian-constructions-collage-vertical-sprawlArchitectural and social utopias
in Science Fiction movies
@
Utopian Cities, Programmed Societies
Victoria Summer Camp (Victoria, Romania)
June 24 – 29, 2019

Research and exhibition project Utopian Cities, Programmed Societies, organized by Dana Diminescu and Tincuta Heinzel, the summer camp gathered students, scientists, and artists from Romania, UK, Germany and France.
Exploring the relationship between utopian constructions of cities and societies, corresponding with architecture, technology, environment and industry, evaluating possibilities for transforming existing and former utopias. The planned city of Victoria served as a starting point and as the place to discuss and explore some ideas of utopian societies.

Participating with a talk about Architectural and social utopias in Science Fiction movies as part of a group of doctoral candidates from the KHM in the summer camp in the city of Victoria, Brașov in Romania. Further talks by the group from KHM were Cybernetics and fiction  by Georg Trogemann, From other places to utopian cities by Somayyeh Shahhoseyni and Virtual-Realities-Hybrids by Tobias Bieseke.

Image: Some ideas of utopian cities, singular architectural constructions housing and visualizing the system of society. Some fictional, some realized, the visualizations itself provide the basis of debating utopian cities.

Exemplary collection, vertical movement of the sprawl (from left to right):
Thomas Morus, 1516 -> utopia as insular state
Palmanova, 1600, Italy -> as city state
Arata Isozaki, Clusters in the air, 1960-62, Metabolism movement -> as straining to the sky
Jonathan Swift, Laputa (Grandville), 1856 -> as hovering cities
Stargate SG1, Season 1, (invisible) city of the Nox, 1997 -> as flying cities
Space:1999, 1975-77, moon base alpha -> as colonies in orbit and space