Dystopia

Dystopia is the imagined opposite of utopia: a future or place marked by collapse, oppression, or ecological ruin. It is often used in literature and film to warn about paths society might take. Dystopias exaggerate but also reveal real fears—of surveillance, climate breakdown, authoritarian control. They are not only fictions but mirrors of present conditions, showing what already exists in fragments. Too often, dystopia is used as spectacle, consumed as entertainment rather than a provocation to act.

Planet City is a worldbuilding project by Liam Young, envisioned as a multilayered city, occupying as little as 0,02 percent of Earth’s surface yet hosting all of the human population. Planet City is testing the Half-Earth idea by Edward O. Wilson, where we put aside half of the planet, to keep biodiversity. We spoke with Liam Young about the idea and the exhibition he curates, Visions of Planet City.

We continue with French philosopher Michel Foucault. In his 1967 speech to an architecture audience, he introduced the concept of “heterotopia”. It was published in 1984 as an essay, Des Espaces Autres (Of Other Spaces), and it deals with the nature of space and its relation to society. Heterotopias are unique spatial entities that challenge conventional notions of space and compel reflection on the social, cultural, and ideological matters of our world.

The AI services embedded in tools for creative profiles are developing so rapidly that this article will definitely be outdated by 6 pm tomorrow. Last year we featured a piece on Midjourney and similar platforms, and it already reads like Grandpas discussing ‘the internets’ back in the 90s. I suppose enchantment by civilisation’s technological advances […]

Photographs have been taken at the gardens of Versailles, on February 2015. They accompany the Slovenian translation of the tiny but marvellous book Portret srečnega človeka – André le Nôtre 1613–1700 (Portrait d’un home heureux – André le Nôtre 1613–1700), translated from French by Zoja Skušek, *cf., 2016, written by a renown French author Érik Orsenna, who, among other things, for five years presided L’ École nationale supérieure du paysage at Versailles.

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