With: Arjun Appadurai, Tord Boontje, Wim Delvoye, Driessens & Verstappen, Gunnar Heinsohn, Lino Hellings, Knowbotic Research, Lynn Margulis, Arjen Mulder, Raj Patel, Casey Reas, Ken Rinaldo & Amy Youngs, Lars Spuybroek, Isabelle Stengers, Bruce Sterling, Alberto Toscano, Christian Unverzagt and Herwig Weiser.
Edited by Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder and Lars Spuybroek.
Modernist belief was informed by the vision of technology as a tool of reduction, purifying nature from a state of randomness into one of cleansed controllability and perfection. It was not just the art of modernism that was all about purity and the search for abstraction, the same logic and politics of purity were also at work in rationalized agriculture, refined food, urban planning, population control, and the experience of the Other, both as the goal and the legitimization of the means to reach that goal. With amazing, world changing consequences – but also with devastating effects for the environment, climate, cultural diversity, biopolitics, and city and country life.
This book investigates this urge for the pure, but also advocates a much deeper need for the impure, not to reinstate a new organicism or back-to-nature movement, but to trace progression to a point where all modernist values reverse, where technology becomes an agent for the impure and the imperfect. Technology, long an agent for homogeneity and purity, is now turning into one for heterogeneity and global contingency.
