Society of the And : The Bewildering Interdependence of Our Times

• Society of the AndWith the traveloque of images in the photobook the Society of the And the viewer is challenged to carry out a montage. A dialogue full of ambiguities, contradictions and positions should set itself into presence. While the viewer is invited to look to the facts, I hope s/he start to see beyond the stereotypical, beyond the world of stupifying banality, routine and mechanical reproduction. The format of the images is chosen not only that you decode, that you decipher what you "read" (as in the television news), no, you are also invited to see the free play, the unfinished pieces, the juxtapositions, gaps and openings within the Society of the And. The challenge is to extract a genuine image from the Society of the And, free the visual from any prior program, or fixed gaze (theatricality), to release ourselves from the suffocation of the cliché.A new spectre is haunting the world – the spectre of And. It is the spectre of urbanity, the one of the multitude that haunts society. All the cultural, technological, economical and intellectual powers in the world – both on the left and the right – have embraced this spectre. Formerly the dominant forces were separation and specialisation, the struggle for clarity and the reduction of the world to calculable proportions; now we talk about One World based on simultaneity, mobility, migration, fluidity, multiplicity, reflexivity, individualism, risk, urban warfare, uncertainty, chaos theory, hybridization, diaspora, the state of exception, schizophrenia, privitization, heterotopia, immersion, the space of flows, the culture of sprawl, cyborgs and so on. The Either-Or world in which we lived and acted became increasingly an illusion. Our modernity no longer develops mainly in instrumental, rational and linear terms; instead it takes its direction from the rules of side-effects. In a certain sense Modernity might be considered more ideological while the Society of the And (2nd Modernity) is more pragmaticCurrently Van Toorn has been photographing the current conditions in Dubai, Israel and Egypt and finalizing the introductionary article with the support of the Swedish Research Council Formas, Architecture in Effect. The photo book the "Society of The And. The bewildering interdepence of our times”, includes articles by Stefano Boeri, Bart Lootsma and more than160 pictures by Roemer van Toorn.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Arkitektur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Architecture (hsv//eng)

Keyword

society

and

multitude

photography

globalisation

architecture

space

Aesthetics

estetik

design

design

sociologi

Sociology

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

bok (subject category)

kfu (subject category)