Issues

Rebellion is always necessary, always human, and now – more than ever. Utopia stands against all those who offer us solutions to the ambivalent, confused human condition, and against all those who want us to believe in one single future – theirs. The future is not uniform; it is always plural. Utopia calls for imagination and dreaming, for rebellion and resistance.

This exact question, what is human and what does it mean to be human, beats at the heart of speculative creativity and science fiction. Authors, film-makers, game designers, artists, poets, all playing on the edge, examining the boundaries, exploring the frontiers. What is the demarcation line between man and machine, beast and monster; between natural and artificial, cultured and wild; between the living and the dead, the dead-yet-alive, the undead; what differentiates human from trans-, post- and superhuman, non-human, foreign, alien, demonic and divine.

Is science fiction relevant now? Is horror relevant? Fantasy? The future? Imagination? Utopia? Very much so. Among the many commissions of inquiry that must be established in the wake of the disaster that began on Saturday, October 7th and has not let up for a moment, there must also be a commission of inquiry into the failure of imagination in Israeli culture. Imagination, on every front and at every level, failed utterly. We did not imagine ourselves, nor the other. We did not imagine something better, nor the very worst. We hoped that an ongoing present was a realistic option. We abandoned the arena of dreams to hallucinations and nightmares, and some of them came true, because that is the nature of imagination: to shape and create the reality around us.

We tend to take our homes for granted. Over the past year our homes became frontlines in a covert war. We took shelter. We added much more meaning to our homes, while meaning was being eroded. Who are the political forces that are trying to change our relationship with our home? For over a century The Uncanny was a professional term used in a few specific disciplines: psychology, sociology, robotics and animation. It seldom made it into idle conversation. Nowadays – everyone, everywhere, is talking about it. We’ve all experienced in the flesh the unsettling feeling of the strangely familiar, the unheimlich. The Uncanny is all around us – in our haunted homes, beaming from our screens, in the streets – emptied out, now strangely revitalized, our cities, muted and mutated. It’s in the fabric of everyday life, in the sudden strangeness of daily routines. A fear not triggered by alienation, not external… A fear coming from inside the house! In this issue we explore both the Uncanny and the home, and their strange relationship these days. Don’t be afraid to dive in and join us!

The Designing Tomorrow/s Handbook to Desirable Futures discusses the importance of speculative approaches in today’s data-driven society and presents different methodologies, from speculative design, backcasting to games design as well as use cases.

2 meters (6 feet) of distance. 14 days of isolation. “A good outcome would be 250,000 deaths”. A two billion dollars aid package. How do we talk about the new uncanny numbers and foreign scales that became our reality in the past few months? In what way does the plague, which we’re now in the midst of, exposes the failures of our human perception of the world and our limitations of imagination? Would we learn to look at nature, industry, economy, urbanism, and our place within all of these processes from a new perspective? Or rather, will the limitations of our perception survive this crisis as well?