We Are Mapping Your Dreams
Been reading Charlie Stross’ Accellerando, since it is conveniently available for free via a Creative Commons license.
It’s the future on a grand and intimate scale. He writes what he knows. Which in his case, is an alpha geek’s family emerging into the extropian future.
Even after the solar system is ground into dust to feed a heat-exchanging Matroishka brain, after we lose all semblance of ourselves, there are virtual worlds we inhabit. Which means that after the death of corporations, nation states and the dismantling of the planet – up until the heat death of the universe, interior design will remain an issue of some significance.
As a teenager I spent a fair bit of time backpacking. This encouraged me to think in a utilitarian fashion; whether it’s a smooth rock or a chair, where does it matter where you park your butt? This also alarms some of my more activist friends; I’m generally against large chain stores but am not afraid to enter one or a mall if it serves my interests.
Maybe it’s sharing an office with architects, but I am beginning to pay more attention to how things look and work, to take more care in thinking about what makes an office an office and a home a home. Lord help me, I am a terrible amateur designer of spaces. I know how to design a printed page or webspace, but a home? I lean towards Early American Disaster. Or Default Punk/DIY Everything Everywhere.*
Did William Gibson‘s descriptions of decaying geodesics touch a chord? This weekend I took two hours to check in with Khmer Architecture Tours. It was great to see some of the decaying modernist architecture, soon to be destroyed forever. Try these elaborations of traditional Khmer architecture via the 1960s and Paris. There was a Moment here where something really different happened. If we’re smart, we’ll hang on to what documentation we have.
Avatars in the Matrix, farm workers sitting in plastic chairs around a tin table…. what we as Westerners crave is that which is most hard to find in a world of Starbucks and McDonald’s: authenticity. As we upload our brains into a computer world, we’ll want to have mapped our special places and spaces, to reconfigure and reinhabit. Fabrics, textures, designs, sounds, smells, all that indivduates an environment, virtual or real.
And if this ring of authenticity is so important, why pack it up and reproduce it, when we can live in the here and now? There is something to be said for real time and real places. Perhaps extropian apotheosis is appropriate for an alpha geek, but does it have appeal for a rice farmer?
Tags: Extropianism; Interior Design;Khmer Architecture
*(No, Punk hasn’t hit Cambodia yet but we are working on that.)
