THE UTOPIA PROJECT

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the Rocky Mtn. Utopia Project, check out

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The Utopia project; as I call it is not what it at first appears. It is not so much a projected futurism, but really more of a reflected potential “nowism” if I can invent a word. In fact most of the actual technology is not beyond our current ability at all. This project is an attempt to visually recapture the lines of thinking of the past toward a future that might have been had we, as humans had not become entangled in the morass of human greed and shortsightedness which to all evidences now seems to manifest. It is my private attempt to depict a world that might have been as it was proposed by futurists from the 1960’s through the 1980’s.

As I began this project, it was going to be a simple rendering project of futuristic images based largely on the planned look of Disney’s Tomorrowland and EPCOT center. It then grew beyond belief into the project it is today. The rewarding thing about it has been that as I started to investigate further into the lines of thinking I was developing, I found that many great scientific and speculative thinkers of the last few decades had been thinking along the same lines as well. This has created a solid base from which to build.

Going into this project I had to keep two things clear. One; that total and complete understanding of each technology and its workings were not a necessity. Following Clarke’s first law “any sufficiently advanced technology to us would be practically indistinguishable from magic.” Imagine if you will; the giving of a pocket calculator to a primitive culture. First the function itself would be totally beyond a hunter gatherer community, as mathematics would be something foreign, let alone the ideas behind the actual functioning processes involved with the device itself. Most people today couldn’t tell you how a pocket calculator works. In fact most people use their cell phone for such application if anything at all. The second factor that must be kept in mind is that the society depicted is an ALTERNATE development of the human species, and utopic at that. In fact the very word “UTOPIA” literally translates as “no place,” meaning the ideas aren’t really meant to exist in the first place.

The technologies depicted rely upon a completely different way of handling social and monetary structures that we are using in our current evolution as a species. From a technological standpoint, many of the concepts depicted function to create low impact to the environment as well as maximizing an individuals potential as a complete and evolved human. The technolologies were divided into several categories such as Food, Communication, Energy, Work and Play, Transportation, Architecture, Living Environments, and Robotics Design to name a few. So join me in a brief exploration of images from a “Future Past.”