The Visual Assemblies are coming to Austria: on Saturday October 4, 10:00 – 12:00, we will imagine, discuss and draw cities of the future.
Continuing our Visual Assembly project – which David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky came up with to try out different tools for being together, for creating a community and decision-making, beyond just talks, speeches, votes, reports and reports – we’re inviting you to participate in an experiment. Activists, artists, work collectives, and ordinary people can all take these tools and use them to explore new possibilities for our communities.
At its heart, we hope that Visual Assemblies can serve as a way to re‑imagine how we run and organise our social systems. Participants use drawing and discussion as a form of participatory spatial and social speculative planning. While an art project, the work isn’t merely about art; it’s meant to be a public debate about how to rearrange the spaces we share: health‑care, education, housing, and more.
For the Transition to a (more) socially and environmentally just future conference in Vienna, in line with the theme of constructing the paths to transition, we will try to see how the making of our (future) cities can go right and pretty wrong.
Participants will start out with maps for two cities: one utopian, one dystopian. Because utopia and dystopia never exist separately, right? They’re always intertwined, and when building one, you have to keep the other in mind.
First of all, we’ll design our democratic, technological city – with flying cars and entire floating structures! We’re starting with the participants’ own dwellings and working our way up to the public infrastructure that connects and supports us all. Since it’s a future city, we’ll be thinking about sci-fi technologies and institutions that can make such a society happen.
At the same time, another group will imagine a dystopian city with a centralized control system (what if it’s actually more efficient?). In this society, most public spaces and institutions have to somehow affirm the authority of one leader. What technologies will exist there? Maybe the robots that cleaned people’s houses now do it conditionally, based on people’s loyalty? Or perhaps the centralized society would be super effective – not just at controlling its citizens but everyone around them?
We’d love it if participants from both groups talk with each other, and they will be given opportunities to interact and intervene in each other’s cities which they have designed. That discussion between utopian and dystopian futures, we hope, will inspire ideas that can help us reflect on our current cities.
Register here – and spread the word. See you in Vienna!
Saturday, October 4
10:00 – 12:00
Facilitator: Barış Eser.
Conference:
This Visual Assembly is part of the Transition to a (more) socially and environmentally just future conference organized by Josef Mühlbauer, Thomas Stölner, Utta Isop, Michael Wissgott and Uwe Bittlingmayer.
This year’s theme is about anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchical structures that can get us there. There will be music, panel discussions (on history, on contemporary revolutionary movements) as well as workshops such as our Visual Assembly. Here are the main five categories under which events will be organized:
- Revolutionary Paths – Which approaches meet today’s challenges?
- Direct Action & Civil Society Organisation
- Education & Change of Consciousness
- Gradual or Evolutionary Change (Reformism)
- Current Points of Transformation: Anti-Fascism, Digitality, Agrifood, Philosophy
