Although Italian Futurism is a movement of the early 20th century, it hasn’t vanished into irrelevance. Even though some aspects can look unseemly to us now, other key values have been left scratched into our culture. What connections do you see when examining our relationship with (/ feelings towards / implementation of / level of success with) current waste conversion technologies? Particularly with how we view the hi-tech, the relationship between humans and nature, and modernity?
Engage: Italian Futurism and modern applied technologies
This entry was posted in 2/26 - Old and New Waste Conversion Technologies; Italian Futurism (Week 5) and tagged waste-to-energy, Italian futurism, futurism. Bookmark the permalink.
After reading the piece, I also agree the manifesto was rather unseemly. The author and his friends take a rather radical approach when they detail their feeling towards the past and the future. While the author wishes to push forward in his thinking, he also makes the preservers of history (museum/library/architecture) seem almost irrelevant, which I think is where his argument is strained.
As we move forward in our creations of new technology, we will rely heavily on expert’s projections. In order for accurate projections, things of the past like libraries will be crucial in collecting data, which is essential for the projections. In order for us to guess at the future, we must fully understand the past.
The one point I found remarkably accurate for a document that is over one hundred years old was the first bullet in ‘The Manifesto of Futurism’. The first point states: ‘We intend to sing to the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness’. We know of the danger, but most people don’t care enough to make a difference. Our society is doesn’t act, it reacts. I feel that we might need a definitive ‘turning point’ in order for our feelings toward the importance of green technology to shift, we can only hope that that will bring some successful implementation to mitigate the further effects of Global Warming. We have a habit of using energy and creating waste that we don’t want to give it, for some it may be because of their fearlessness, but for others it is definitely ignorance.