Willravel

The following link is to a brilliant painting (warning, the pic is fucking huge):
http://uploadingit.com/files/528718_...nough_2500.jpg

Here we see an amazing contrast between a hyper-futuristic metropolis and a simple agrarian village. While the message of the picture deals with pollution, it begs an entirely different question in my mind:
In which society would you rather live?

I myself am quite torn. While I recognize that the evidently simple way of life is more natural and healthy for humans, I also recognize my love of human development and see all of the great dreams of science fiction that could be. This illustrates a fundamental paradox in humanity which seeks to find balance between looking back and looking forward. I see immense benefits to each way of life and incredible drawbacks.

In the simple society one may not have access to state of the art medicine or "things", but you're surrounded by everyone you know and love. There is a fundamental disconnect with the people that you're surrounded by every day in the metropolis. You may know a few of your neighbors and people from work, but every day you walk by thousands of strangers.

What do you think?

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Cynthetiq

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion”. Henry David Thoreau

It's a big picture, and I think that's part of this question since I had to scroll around looking for where in the photo I'd fit in.

I'd be happy in either place, but the most important part to me isn't where I'd rather be, but where I was when I awoke. I'd rather not fight where I am, I'd rather not long for a different place. I'd rather figure out how to enjoy where I am better.

There are a few things in life you have absolutely no choice in the matter, one is you cannot choose your parents, what land you are born, and what economic status you're born in. Those are things you have to accept as basic foundations of yourself.

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QuasiMondo

The metropolis looks like it has better internet access.

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"Like it or not, change has come. O.J. is in prison, and a black man is in the White House. Is everybody happy now?"

-Tim Reid & Tom Dreesen

girldetective

and walking distance to the nearest corner joint.

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. . .

Running out the door again--blowing you a nice long kiss - DA

I'll wager that a year from now you will look back at this with a tug, and a wince... Leto

Shauk

It's so sad that that is what I was thinking.

Redlemon

I don't think they have an optometrist in the village. Without vision correction, I'd be dead. I'll live in the city. I'm also fond of indoor plumbing.

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I can't read your signature. Sorry.

jewels

I think I'll choose both so I won't get bored with either.

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Politics is applesauce.


- Will Rogers

Baraka_Guru

Yes, I would like to summer with the agrarians.

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"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. [...] In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer."

—"Politics and the English Language," George Orwell

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality."

—"Burnt Norton," Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot

Ustwo

I'd pay the agrarians a few shiny coins for fishing trips a couple of times a year.

While the simple life has its pluses, being covered in animal dung with poor medical care, while at the mercy of the elements loses its charms quickly.

There are reasons why our life expectancy is no longer in the 40's and getting out of such societies is a big part of it.

Of course I think there is a happy medium, something we are close to now in the West, but the painting shows very primitive, where the high technology is the windmill vrs hover cars.

I recall reading some piece a number of years back where it claimed the average American life style would have taken around 125 slaves to achieve in Roman times, and that village is lower technology than the Romans.

So while I think of myself as at home in the wilds, I grew up wandering local woods and fishing, I'd head to the city, no hesitation (provided it wasn't run by Ming the Merciless).

One more very important consideration. The agrarians I doubt have anything close to a safety razor. Do you know what that means? I like my women bald eagle.

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onesnowyowl

I prefer the city in this case. I like convenience.

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If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau

genuinegirly

I've never tried living in a truly agrarian environment. I'd like to give it a try before deciding.

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"violence is no more or less real than non-violence. " roachboy

Jinn

Technology, for sure.

You also, generally, speaking, don't ever want to be downstream from a mega-city like that.

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If you struggle with something your entire life, try harder.
Awareness without action is worthless, and failure is not an accident.

Bees

This city is too sterile for me I won't live with my head in a cloud
I'll give up my creature comforts to walk barefoot on the dirt and be proud



Now I live happily with the agrarists as the effluent of your burn out life will forever drop
Into our river then become cleansed to nourish our bountiful crop

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The sands of time past keep shifting according to how we remember or forget or refashion it in hindsight, which is no sight at all.
Kajal Basu

Ustwo

Piss soup from the sky.
Makes our fish grow.
Grass is green.
Doctor sacrificed chicken.
Cancer metastasized.

__________________
Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

lotsofmagnets

yes it does seem like a strange place to set up an amish community, unless the ultra futuristic water coming from the ultra futuristic city has been or remains pure due to people´s realisation that poluted water isn´t good for the environment...

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mother nature made the aeroplane, and the submarine sandwich, with the steady hands and dead eye of a remarkable sculptor.
she shed her mountain turning training wheels, for the convenience of the moving sidewalk, that delivers the magnetic monkey children through the mouth of impossible calendar clock, into the devil's manhole cauldron.
physics of a bicycle, isn't it remarkable?

Bees

Agrarian state of the art
Everyone does their part

At first our medicine follows the shaman's way
Later supplanted by our women gathering the herbs to create the natural way

__________________
The sands of time past keep shifting according to how we remember or forget or refashion it in hindsight, which is no sight at all.
Kajal Basu

jewels

I think there's a bubble over the city. Self-contained, self-destructive.

__________________
Politics is applesauce.


- Will Rogers

Martian

I'd rather not live in either. I hate large cities, but I also recognize the rural society depicted as idealistic and not representative of reality.

If I had to choose, though, and if my health weren't an issue (it would otherwise take the choice away from me) I think it'd be the agrarian commune. Mostly because I really can't stand large cities. They stifle me.

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Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on and on and on and on

- Journey, Don't Stop Believein'

roachboy

uh---if you take that image as a way of transposing the present into the future (you know, take the way folk interact as you understand it now and shift it forward in time) i'm not sure that you'd want to like in the foreground. look at the fucking pipes.
this would be a pathological space. social relation would be mirror images of what you'd find in the city, but without the functionality.

the windmill would probably be an ornament.
folk in the city could walk to the edge and look out over the vast plain of their own waste and think "what happy peasants there are."
but these happy peasants would be living in a space defined entirely by the waste flows from a huge city.


the city is just a bunch of verticals. you don't know anything at all about it.
except that it was designed with the assumption that it's somehow ok to simply dump water and waste outside its immediate borders and just leave it there. i expect then that you'd find alot of television-viewers in the city--self-absorbed people living in some fantasy that the machine they move through is a "city on a hill."

i'd rather live outside the painting altogether.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Martian

I think you're interpreting the image too literally. I took it as a statement of contrasts , and not a literal representation of geographical space. The two ideals are depicted side by side as a way of showing two different potential forms of a utopian ideal, and the geographic relation between them is more a form of artistic license than anything else.

Of course, this then raises questions of how best to interpret art, and whether or not the artist's intention carries any greater inherent weight than the viewer's own bias, but that goes beyond the scope.

The farming community is upstream of the city. The basin must empty somewhere not depicted. Of course, this is again interpreting the picture literally.

__________________
Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on and on and on and on

- Journey, Don't Stop Believein'

Lucifer

do you think that the small rustic community has good wi-fi being that close to the megacity?

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Now there's a fire down below, but it's coming' up here,
Leave everything you know, carry only what you fear,
On the road the sun is sinking low, there's bodies hangin' in the trees,
This is what will be, this is what will be.

roachboy

martian: there's nothing utopian about that image.
people imagine "utopia" as a state--it wouldn't be, and that isn't a coherent way to think about social reality, either in the present or in the future. if you like the idea of heaven, that'd be a state. our world is process, like it or not.

the image provides alot of information and there's no reason to go outside it, really. representational pieces like that are self-enclosed and self-enclosing. so you can read off from that material it provides you.
and if you look at the information, the center of the image is not the city and not the museum of rusticity arrayed around the lagoons of god-knows-what that pour out from underneath this city (about which you know nothing except there's some strange affinity for pointy things abroad in it)--it's the pipes.

i read the whole piece from the pipes outward.

the organization of the piece is a series of prompts as to how to read off from it.
if you don't take them into account, then you're not talking about the piece at all.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Martian

Naturally. A utopian state may be depicted, however, even if it is static and therefore unattainable. I think everything one needs to know about the concept of utopia is contained within the etymology of the word.

You read the whole piece from the pipes outward, but that's not the only way to read it. Or, more accurately, there are different ways of interpreting that. I see the pipes and the underlying body of water as a division, seperating the ultra-technologist image from the simple agrarian one. Given the slightly negative portrayal of the high-tech city, one could read the image as a criticism of the technological advancement at all costs outlook, or as a yearning for a simpler lifestyle. I see both images as ultimately detached from reality, which is of course why I think the word utopia is a fitting description of either. It's notable that there are as many or more people depicted revelling around the bonfire as there are actually working in the lower portion of the image, whereas the upper portion depicts no actual people at all, and thus creates a stately and somewhat forbidding image. Neither one is true-to-life, nor is the piece when taken as a whole.

I think it's a mistake to approach any art as completely self-contained. Not every artist goes to the dadaist extreme of relying on the viewer's interpretation, but all art is inherently subject to some level of interaction with the viewer and therefore somewhat subjective in nature. I'm unwilling to get too involved in a discussion of art appreciation here because I do prefer to stick to the thread's original premise, but at the same time I don't know that we can discuss this work without considering the viewer's position and the validity of subjective interpretation.

__________________
Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on and on and on and on

- Journey, Don't Stop Believein'

Baraka_Guru

__________________
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. [...] In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer."

—"Politics and the English Language," George Orwell

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality."

—"Burnt Norton," Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot

roachboy