“The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life.” – Georg Simmel –
By 2050 the world will reach 10 billion people, 70 precent of which will live in the large cities. Israel, a small and already dense country, is projected to go through an even more drastic transformation by then. Even before the pandemic, concern of this future had already existed. The tech revolution allowed people to leave the office, and The City, behind. It allowed them to piece themselves together anywhere in the world, nomadically.
What is the threshold that separates the countryside from the city, what is its future, and do we really have a choice?
There are many ways to make sense of events beyond our immediate control. The most convincing explanations seem to have a clear narrative arc – applicable to real world circumstances ranging from policy debates to technological projections. The Science Fiction genre might as well have been described as ‘speculative fiction’ and doesn’t have anything to do with ‘science’ at all. Instead, it is more concerned with the general principles of life and associated imagined consequences. Understanding The medium of fiction allows us to speculate as a response to a phenomena or a discovery. Only then can these be debated, or taken apart. In a sense, a public narrative should not be received as definitive, but as the starting point of the story. What is the stated dilemma, context or motive for any one of these problems? And most importantly, how does the formulation of a problem determines its proposed solution? Perhaps, the best way to understand our future is through narratives that distort, pervert and animate reality.
Directors – David Gak Vassallo – Jeremie Mellul
Architecture students at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design