Beijing – Last City

It has been three years since I am in Beijing. I have been dismissed from the network. I was born in The Other World. In which country? I have no idea. Countries don’t exist anymore. The network took over territories, borders, cultures. No… Really, at best you belong to a dedicated space on the Cloud. From The Other World Beijing is an abstract concept: Unplugged City, The Hole, The Island: many names given to the unknown. Beijing means for us reality. The last part of the world that cannot be access by the network. The last city emancipated from the virtual world. The other world has millions of shapes, forms, meanings. It is what each individual envision. An ideal reality offered to everyone by a complex program. It all started with screens always involving to provide a bigger window to the world and to others. Few decades later every interactions could be achieve from the same place: dinner with friends, groceries, work, holidays. Each year the technology would be better and it started displaying an improved reality. Through those screens, friends, family, landscapes, light would be always perfect and human kind started finding in reality a growing source of disappointment. Human were evolving to become reality intolerant. The network kept growing. Soon sophisticated screens allowing you to choose your own reality would replace every architectural element… The disappearance of the window was the end of the last remaining link to the ancient world. People happily sealed their last relation towards reality. Time, space and light became programmed. Each individual was able to live his own dream, taking away, in the same time, the very notion of dreams. Nowadays, from the other world, only a single fear remains: confrontation with reality. In Beijing evolution was stopped on time. It started with the famous revolution when the people brought down the government. Then the federal division of China allowed each region to decide for his own. Most area joins the network willing to be part of this on going movement. But the most radical revolutionary were controlling Beijing and voted to create a new model opposed to the main one and based on old precept taking the best from Confucius and Communism to bring back human interaction as the spine of this new society. It ended up being the only alternative model to The Other World. Soon it attracted people from all over the network and it became the only land of exile in this world. I will never forget when I arrived in this city. I finally understood what was behind all those meaningless pictures that composed my life so far. It pushed me to go further to understand everything about this new world and not to forget the old one. I started gathering thoughts and sketches, to create links between things. I choose eight of those notes to give you a fragment of this prehistoric future. A future shaped through involution to escape the inevitable extinction of an on-going evolution.