This is a work of fiction. I have tried to invent a story which may seem a possible, or at least not wholly impossible, account of the future of man; and I have tried to make that story relevant to the change that is taking place today in man’s outlook.
To romance of the future may seem to be indulgence in ungoverned speculation for the sake of the marvellous. Yet controlled imagination in this sphere can be very valuable exercise for minds bewildered about the present and its potentialities. Today we should welcome, and even study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarize ourselves with the certainty that many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds. To romance of the far future, then, is to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain nw values.
[…] This stance is not contradictory: Dj-ing is writing, writing is Dj-ing. Writing is music, I cannot explain this any other way. Take Nietzsche, for instance, whose brilliant texts are almost musical. Obviously, you feel the rythm inside a great poet stanza, but it’s there within the great philosophers’ paragraphs as well. So many media and cultural techniques of interpretation coexist – reading, watching, listening, surfing, dancing – that this textual/sonic synaesthesia demands a great deal from us. Yet in pop culture, that deadly inertia I mentionned earleir can put a stop to the idealism of coexistence. people can become so unreflective n their usual media-habits that any kind of systemic renewal takes a long time to succeed.
(…) The feeling that members of one species deserve special moral consideration as compared with members of other species is old and deep. Killing people outside war is the most seriously–regarded crime ordinarily committed. The only thing more strongly forbidden by our culture is eating people (even if they are already dead). We enjoy eating members of other species, however. Many of us shrink from judicial execution of even the most horrible human criminals, while we cheerfully countenance the shooting without trial of fairly mild animal pests. Indeed we kill members of other harmless species as a means of recreation and amusement. A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and—according to recent experimental evidence—may even be capable of learning a form of human language. The foetus belongs to our own species, and is instantly accorded special privileges and rights because of it. Wether the ethic of ‘speciesism’, tu use Richard Ryder’s term,. can be put on a logical footing any more sound than that of ‘racism’, I do not know. What I do know is that it has no proper basis in evolutionary biology.
(…) This explanation is based on the misconception that i have already mentionned, that living creatures evolve to do things ‘for the good of the species’ or ‘for the good of the group’. It is easy to see how this idea got its start in biology. Much of an animal’s life is devoted to reproduction, and most of the acts of altruistic self-sacrifice that are observed in nature are performed by parents towards their young. ‘Pepretuation of the species’ is a common euphemism for reproduction, and its undeniably a consequence of reproduction. It requires only a slight over-stretching of logic to deduce that the ‘function’ of reproduction is ‘to’ perpetuate the species. From thisit is but a further short false step to conclude that animals will in general behave in such a way as to favour the perpetuation of the species. ALtruism towards fellow members of the species seems to follow.
This line of thought can be put into vaguely Darwinian terms. Evolution works by natural selection, and natural selection means the differential survival of the ‘fittest’. But are we talking about the fittest individuals, teh fittest races, the fittest species, or what? For some purposes this does not greatly matter, but when we are talking about altruism it is obviously crucial.
(…) I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. A am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave. I stress this because I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case. My own feeling is that a human society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true.
(…) If you want to know something else about beauty, what precisely it is, look at a history of art. You will see that every age has had its ideal Venus (or Apollo), and that all these Venuses or Apollos put together and compared out of the context of their periods are nothing less than a family of monsters.
(…) ‘The basic teaching error of the academy was that of directing its attention toward genius rather than the average.’ (Bauhaus)
(…) the designer is therefore the artist of today, not because he is a genius but because he works in such a way as to re-establish contact between art and the public, because he has the humility and ability to respond to whatever demand is made of him
by the society in which he lives, because he knows the job, and the ways and means of solving each problem of design. And finally because he responds to the human needs of his time, and helps people to solve certain problems without stylistic preconceptions or false notions of artistic dignity derived from the schism of the arts.
(…) Research design is concerned with experiments of both plastic and visual structures in two or more dimensions. It tries out the possibilities of combining two or more dimensions, attempts to clarify images and methods in the technological field, and carries out research into images on film.
(…) Design came into being in 1919, when Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus at Weimar. Part of the prospectus of this school reads:
‘ We know that only the technical means of artistic achievement can be taught, not art itself. The function of art has in the past been given a formal importance which has served it from our daily life; but art is always present when apeople lives sincerely and healthily
‘Our job is therefore to invent a new system of education that may lead — by wayof a new kinf od specialized teaching of science and technology — to a complete knowledge of human needs and a universal awareness of them
‘ Thus our task is to make a new kind of artist, a creator capable of understanding every kind of need: not because he is a prodigy, but because h eknows how to approach human needs according to a precise method. We wish to make him conscious of his creative power, not scared of new facts, and independent of formulas in his own work.’
(…) What Gropius wrote is still valid. This first school of design did tend to make a new kind of artist, an artist useful to society because he helps society to recover its balance, and not to lurch between a false world to live one’s material life in and an ideal world to takemoral refuge in.
(…) Actually, typefaces and racing bikes are very much alike. Both are ideas as well as machines, and neither should be burdened with excess drag or baggage. Pictures of pumping feet will not make the type go faster, any more than smoke trails, pictures of rocket ships or imitation lightning bolts tied to the frame will improve the speedof the bike
(…) The easiest way to think of cosines is to imagine yourself walking counterclockwise around a circle. This circle is centered on the X and Y axis, and has a radius of 1. Radius is the length from the center of the circle to the edge. A cosine of the angle in respect to the positive horizontal axis (aka, the length in our case because we are on a unit circle (radius = 1)) is our position on the X axis as we walk around the circle if we started at X = 1. We must also remember that the length around a circle with a radius of 1 is 2pi. So, cos(0) is 1, because we haven’t gone anywhere; we are still standing at the beginning, at X = 1, cos(pi) is -1, because we have travelled halfway around the circle to X = 1, and cos(2pi) is 1, because since we have travelled all the way around our circle, we have ended up back at the beginning (Figure 1).
* ‘On Compression’ was originally produced for A couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould, edited by Steven Bode (London: Film & Video Umbrella, 2008), and typeset using TEX.
