Where would you rather live?
 

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?

“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.

The metropolis looks like it has better internet access.

and walking distance to the nearest corner joint.

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

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.

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

Yes, I would like to summer with the agrarians. :thumbsup:

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.

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

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

Technology, for sure.

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

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

http://img1.orkut.com/images/milieu/...30/Zzn13h4.jpg

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

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

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

huh--i wasn't taking anything about the image as true-to-life---i don't even see photographs that way--simply because the map is not the territory.

i just relied on the organization of the image and will's prompt in the op.

representational art is mostly about how the image is organized, then its about patterns of resonance that are set up via the imagery, which are in a sense made hierarchical in a way that is specific to the image through its organization.

there are tons of ways to read the image--i'm not a fan of it (but it's technically kinda cool)....at any rate, that's why i read it as i did.

that and if anything, in the world of utopian imagery, its dystopian. which is a good word.

btw:
most visual art forms of dada simply worked off the assumption that art is what an artist (who is someone who occupies that social position) says it is--so by extension what appears in a particular social space that defines it as art is art--so by extension the definition of art is socially situational--so there's no "essence' that distinguishes art from non-art--so "art" is an arbitrary category, its meanings entirely social.

this is very different from "pure subjective interpretation"--which generally takes the socially situated as given, as data, and reads it from there. so you're subjective interpretation of a piece would be shaped fundamentally by its appearing in a way that defined it as "art"--not the same, not the same.


baraka guru: our posts crossed and that nice word dystopia appears in both of them...

Brave New World? I hadn't even thought of that.

EDIT for major cross-posting.

I will admit that my learning when it comes to art appreciation is decidedly limited. I endeavour to avoid misapplying the terms, but as my knowledge is incomplete I cannot be sure.

I didn't initially view it as a dystopian piece, and am still not entirely certain I agree with that interpretation. I can see the merit in it, though.

Still does. We just don't see them.

Sweet, send me the pretty ones.

Dude, they're twelve-year-olds.

Here is a digital painting that offers a similar amazing contrast so well described in Willravel's threadstarter.
http://fantasyartdesign.com/free-wal...al-image03.jpg

In this case the choice is much easier for us to make. You won't find me walking proudly barefoot on the dirt in the shanty town.

The painting also illustrates the points made by Ustwo and abaya.
In North America and Europe we don't see the virtual slaves as easily as we would in the developing world. The reality of metropolitan growth in the developing world is well depicted in this painting. Sadly I am inclined to believe that the ratio pointed out by Ustwo and seconded by abaya is probably pretty accurate as much as I wanted to deny it when I first read Ustwo's reply.

What do you think?

When in Rome.

I'd rather live in the city.

Far bigger margins, many more angles.

I'd definitely live in the city, seeing as how my life consists of the Internet and Call of Duty 4, with a side helping of writing and movies. Seeing as how only one works in the Agrarian village, I think my choice works out perfectly.

However.

If I had a more expanded choice, I'd live in a small suburb city of a larger, more advanced city. For example, I live currently in a suburb of Charleston which, while not particularly advanced, is still a big, busy place, and I go crazy every time I stay too long. Therefore, if I could live in a respectable little place near somewhere equaling New York or Los Angeles, that would do me just fine.

Though Australia would be better than all of the above. Less likely of getting nuked.

Oops, tangent.

I could never live in a society that condones seine net fishing. No village for me. I mean what's next, clubbing baby seals? Dying them blue? This whole imaginary world is already going to hell in a handbasket.

Can I just live in the sewer pipes and befriend rats?

Well, by first thought was, the village would have better mountain biking. Then I thought, would I have a mountain bike in that case?

I guess I'd have to take the city. Its not like I couldn't leave, they have flying cars, so I'm assuming i could ditch whenever I needed to. So yea, I'd just have a summer home over in the village.

I like where I live now. Cityscape if I want to, but the wilderness is literally only 5 minutes away.

If I'm going to be destroyed by one thing or another, I'd like to have a say in how it happens. I'll live in the city and respect the decisions of those who don't see eye-to-eye with me and want to live in the village. My anarcho-primitivist phase is years behind me, anyway.

RetroGunslinger,
What version of Call of Duty would you be playing in this hyper-futuristic metropolis? Maybe your Call of Duty there would be real combat .

At least in the Agrarian village you can clearly see what options you have for work. Work options in this city are unseen and unknown to us.
If you choose to live in this city of the future your only option for work might be hyper-combat in it's version of the war in Iraq.

BTW - I have nothing against Call of Duty 4. My video game days are behind me but sometimes I sit fascinated for hours watching my son play it.

There is something joyful, about coming home from a long day of work, logging on to a game like COD4, and driving young males half your age to frustration as you dominate the game with both superior reflex's and intelligent play. I think its called pwning them in the face.

Similarly, there is something joyful about coming home from a long day of work, logging onto COD4 with your coworkers, and pwning old men twice your age with your youthful optimism and reaction time.

I love that the VP of my company doesn't hold it against me that I rock him every Thursday night..

The pipes being so large and high above the village makes it seems like it's squelching out onto them, like it's saying "fuck you, village." I really like that painting.

When it comes to where I'd prefer to live, I really enjoy rural areas in the short term, but I think being somewhere like that with a minimal amount of stimuli would be basically a breeding ground for restless feelings. Having grown up in an urban area, I don't think I'd be able to handle it. I need to be distracted constantly in order to function.