Posts tagged spectacle

While it’s certainly true that dystopian science fiction has become popular in the last few decades, it doesn’t follow that no one has been putting forward more optimistic pictures of tomorrow. Just because Stephenson and others embraced the dark images of cyberpunk, environmental doom, and whatnot doesn’t mean everyone did. From the 1980s to the early 2010s, the late author Iain Banks (who I have nominated for canonization) spun fantastic visions of a post-scarcity society he dubbed The Culture, which was full of artificially-intelligent robots and ships, giant space colonies, individuals who lived almost forever and regularly swapped genders, and seemingly endless, endless wonder. Similarly, Star Trek went off television from 2005 to 2017, but its vision of post-scarcity goodwill and polite liberalism — what a friend described as the Enlightenment-on-speed — continued all the while on the big screen.

via https://www.fastcompany.com/90247038/sorry-but-we-cant-fantasize-our-way-out-of-this-mess

The replica of Hallstatt, a centuries-old village in Austria, opened in the Chinese province of Guangdong amid some controversy, as natives of the original Hallstatt were not initially made aware that their historic buildings and streets were being ripped off.

http://www.businessinsider.com/china-has-built-a-copycat-version-of-an-entire-austrian-village–2012–6

Although public interest in food is not new, there seems to be a reinvigorated attentiveness to food in contemporary society. Multiple factors are at play in this. In part this reinvigorated attentiveness to food stems from an increasing awareness of the connection between kinds of food, modes of food production, and health. In part it stems from the topic of sustainability and the realization that changes in agricultural practices could help foster a more sustainable society. For some, this attention to food is as an act against previous paradigms of domestic convenience. And, in part this reinvigorated attentiveness to food stems from access to a greater diversity of food and thereby an ability to experiment with different foodstuffs and cuisines.

http://twenty.fibreculturejournal.org/2012/06/19/fcj–142-spectacles-and-tropes-speculative-design-and-contemporary-food-cultures/