Utopia and Dystopia (9/4/2013)

For this session we discussed the difference between a utopia and a dystopia.

First we made a list of the words we associated with these two worlds.

Utopia:

• Joined society. 
• Perfect.
• Paradise. 
• Easy.

Dystopia:

• Broken society.
• Horrible. 
• Chaos. 
• Difficult. 

I then made the following notes for the background and development of Utopian ideals.

• Utopia is a Greek meaning that is a pun on words as it stands for 'no place' and 'good place'.
• Looked at Fred T's picture 'Street Lights' as it was a 1894 representation of the year 2000. This was rather cool and interesting, especially since it looked rather steampunk and was made before the trend existed. 
• Looked at Plato's republic (c.380BC) and Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516).
• You may need a power structure of some sort to keep a Utopian government together. After all, human greed and lust for power is what kills such societies. For example, in an ideal world where everything is free one man may ask for one car and another ten! Therefore the two may fight and that ideal may grow out of control. 
• Surprisingly, even in the oldest adaptions of Utopia it appears that slaves were still used and in one such example wives who betrayed their husbands were made slaves. This is interesting as perhaps the recent game to be released 'Bioshock Infinite' took these examples of  Utopian society for their city floating in the sky. The city is based on older morals since it was launched in 1901 and therefore even when the players visits it in 1912 it still uses black workers as waiters and cleaners.
• Utilitarianism = 'Seeking happiness in the form of pleasure'. This includes phyical and intellectual.
• Looked at John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873). Just because we want something doesn't make it good. 
• And Rubens, The Garden of Eden, C.1600. 
• Adam and Eve - The idea of Utopia before man was cast out. 
• Utopias are built on ideals, therefore others will disagree with them and will want to do what they believe is right.
• Looked at the painting by Hieronymus Bosch named 'Garden of Earthly Delights' (1510). This is described as an incredibly important piece of art.

• Utopian designs for houses have also been designed in the belief that everyone would like the design. Such a design was created by De Stiji Manifesto in 1980. However these 'everyday houses' never got built as ironically the artists spent too long trying to design them to be bigger for themselves. 
• Looked at artwork by Piet Mondrain as it appeared simple in design and therefore was meant to appeal to everyone.
• We also looked at one of the first attempts at building a Utopia in the form of an American town called 'Levittown' which was built by a man named Levit in 1948. Everyone owned identical houses and furniture and came from a similar background in order to make sure they had no complaints and fitted in. However, this idea fell apart when the families started a riot when the first black family tried to move in.  
• We then looked at video game examples under the name Sim-Utopias. In 'The Sims' you are able to create Sims with the personalities and ideals you want. Therefore you could in theory create your idea of a perfect world. However, this doesn't always work due to the game's programming. For example, Sims need to socialise otherwise they get unhappy and can become depressed. Therefore, having a happy Sim that lives on his own isn't always possible as your Sims may have to get married to fulfill their needs. 
• Nowadays the word Utopia is refereed to as 'falls to dystopia' since it always seems to fail in one way or another.

After discussing Utopian ideals we then moved onto Dystopian ideals. See my notes below.

• A Dystopia always seems worse when it is hidden under the good intentions or ideals of a Utopia.
• Looked at the opening to the movie 'Blue Velvet' in which it plays cheery music and shows an idealistic American town before a man has an accident and loses his ear which is then covered by crawling insects. 
• Looked at the themes presented in Aldous Huxley's 1962 book 'Island'. 
• We then made a note on all the Utopia/Dystopia ideas that existed including The Truman Show, The Matrix, The Prisoner, The Island, Bioshock etc. 
• After the above we then made notes on purely dystopian ones which include Fallout, Mad Max, Children of Men, The Road, Terminator etc.  

Personal tasks I have set for myself include the following:

• Look up the 'Venus project' as I remembered someone talking about it in relation to today's subject and it sounded interesting.
• Look up the game 'Second Life' as it has received a bad reputation in the news. This is because it was first created to be a virtual utopia and a place everyone would go to before the existence of Facebook. However, with the ability to create their own worlds and avatars the players ended up ruining the Utopian ideals of this 'perfect world' game as they started to abuse the resources and do things you couldn't do in real life. Thus perversion has also spread into the game.

Overall I look forward to the next couple of weeks as we should hopefully be getting into groups in order to come up with the ideas for a Utopia of our own creation. This should prove interesting as it doesn't seem to have been successfully done before.

Harvard Referencing: 

• Bosch, H (1510) Garden of Earthly Delights Painting [Online image]. Available at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights_by_Bosch_High_Resolution_2.jpg (Accessed: 9/4/2013).