Transcript Diapositiva 1

ANALYSIS OF UTOPIA
The term utopia comes from the Greek outops , “no-place”, or
eutopos “good place”, and refers to an imaginary perfect
place with ideal laws and social conditions, where everyone
is happy and does not suffering.
Maria Gabriella Palomba IC
UTOPIA AND ANTI-UTOPIA
• Anti-utopia or dystopia is a community or society that is
in some important way undesirable or frightening. It is
literally translated as "not-good place", an antonym of
utopia.
• Such societies appear in many artistic works,
particularly in stories set in a future.
• Dystopias are often characterized by dehumanization,
totalitarian governments, environmental disaster.
• Dystopian societies appear in many sub-genres of
fiction and are often used to draw attention to realworld issues regarding society, environment, politics,
economics, religion, psychology, ethics, science, and/or
technology, which if unaddressed could potentially lead
to such a dystopia-like condition.
Examples of anti-utopia
Famous depictions of dystopian
societies include R.U.R. (which introduced
the concept of robots and the word "robot" for
the first time)
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
which takes place in a
totalitarian invasive super
state
Brave New World,
where the society’s energy is forcibly
directed intodrug-addled consumerism
and hedonism;
Examples of anti-utopia
Fahrenheit 451, where the state burns
books to create apathy and disinterest in
the general public;
A Clockwork Orange, where the state
uses psychological torture to reform
violent youths;
Blade Runner in which engineered
"replicants" infiltrate society and must be
hunted down before they injure humans;
Examples of anti-utopia
The Matrix, in which the human species is trapped in a
virtual reality world created by intelligent machines,
The Hunger Games, in which the government controls
its people by maintaining a constant state of fear through
forcing randomly selected children to participate in an
annual fight to the death;
Logan's Run, in which both population
And the consumption of resources are
Maintained in equilibrium by requiring
the death of everyone reaching a
particular age;
Examples of anti-utopia
Soylent Green, where society suffers
from pollution, overpopulation, depleted
resources, poverty, dying oceans, a hot
climate, and much of the population
survives on processed food rations,
including "soylent green“
Jack London's novel The Iron Heel
was described by Erich Fromm as
"the earliest of the modern Dystopia".
State of Mind II
Umberto Boccioni
The Farewells (1911 oil on
canvas). The subject is a train
station
with
passengers
boarding two train cars. He has
not painted this work in a
naturalist fashion. It is evident
Boccioni was not attempting to
communicate to his audience
simply the image of a train
station; rather his agenda was
to invoke the sense of motion,
not only temporally, but
sociologically.
(That is to say Boccioni conveys
the innovation of the train as a
method of public transport as well
as a method for molding social
behavior.)
State of Mind II
Umberto Boccioni
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This attempt is successful due to his use
of geometric shapes which are in
juxtaposition with the implication of a
train station, and smoke.
The majority of the composition appears
to be smoke, immersing the train.
Through the smoke there are emerging
figures.
These figures are comprised of cylinder
and triangular shapes.
Each angle is shaded and penetrates
the smoke that looms.
The figures are green, and at first glance
could be seen as smoke flowing out of
the train.
Bruxelles
Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Intrigue in a photograph can be created by alluding to a space or object
that is hidden from the viewer.
• In Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Brussels, 1932, a rough-spun cloth blocks
the sight of some unknown spectacle. One man has found a gap to
peek through, but the other furtively gazes to one side, as if he has
been caught in the act, or is acting the lookout. What scene has caused
such a sense of guilt? Both the photographer and the viewer can
sympathize with this clandestine curiosity.
The Tower of Babel
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
• The Tower of Babel is the subject of three oil
paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
The first, a miniature painted on ivory, was
painted in Rome and is now lost.The two
surviving paintings depict the construction of
the Tower of Babel, which according to the
Book of Genesis in the Bible, was a tower
built by a unified, monolingual humanity as
a mark of their achievement and to prevent
them from scattering:
"Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a
city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and
let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we
shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the
whole earth.'" (Genesis 11:4).
The person in the foreground is likely
Nimrod, who was said to have ordered the
construction of the Tower.
The Human Condition
Rène Magritte
• The human condition I
The first of the two
paintings is a canvas
propped on an easel on
which is painted the
landscape that you see
over the window sill:
canvas and landscape
combine.
The Human Condition
Rène Magritte
• The Human Condition II
In the painting you can see an empty room,
with a door open on the beach. At first sight it
would seem that the arc is not perfect but
there is a recess in the wall, but in reality,
watching carefully, you notice that the canvas
resting on the easel shows the extension of
the landscape in the background. There is
painted an easel and a canvas seat partially in
front of a window, precisely in front of an open
arc on the sea: the canvas reproduces (picture
in picture) the part of the landscape that we
can’t see, and it gives the impression of
perfect continuity with the portion of the
landscape that we see through the window.
Only because of the edge of the canvas we
notice the difference between the surface of
the canvas and the landscape.
QUOTES
• “Human history becomes more and more a race between
education and catasrophe” –Herbert G.Wells
• “The decline of utopia and the rise of its nightmare cousin
is parallel to the history of this surrealist century, which is
at once the partial fullfillment of nineteenth century dreams
and their negation” -Chad Walsh
• “They citizens of utopia have but a few laws … but they
think it against all right and justce that men should be
bound to these laws” -Thomas More