Episodes
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The "other now" described by Varoufakis could exist somewhere in a fissure of the time-space continuum. In this dimension, capitalism (as we know it) is dead, but a liberal and democratic society is thriving.
Yanis Varoufakis is an economist, politician and a former Minister of Finance of Greece, member of the Greek Parliament, co-founder of the European Transnational Party "DiEM25", and science fiction writer.
This episode is hosted by Giuseppe Porcaro, and co-hosted with Alberto Cottica, from the Science Fiction Economics Lab and sees the participation of Teresa O’Connell, acting chief editor at Are We Europe, and Samuel Doveri Vesterbye, director of the European Neighborhood Council. Edited by Stefano Montali.
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In this final episode, Giuseppe Porcaro, Alberto Cottica, and the Architect of Witness, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, talk about to the history of Witness, and wrap up the whole season.
For this season, Europarama joins forces with Edgeryders and their Science Fiction Economics Lab as they had an incredible idea. Instead of writing academic papers, they decided to channel out-of-the box economic research by building the world of Witness.Witness is a fictional city floating in a post-climate change Planet Earth, where people are organised by districts each experimenting a different social contract and a different economic model, but all of them connected by being constrained in that floating space. You are encouraged to contribute to its making or to freely use it for your artistic or research projects.
Join in: https://scifieconomics.world/
This podcast is brought to you by Are We Europe, a border-breaking media trying to bridge the gaps in European culture and identity.
You can become an Are We Europe member and connect with storytellers across the continent starting at €4 a month. Just go to areweeurope.com/member and help Are We Europe build a new media for a changing continent.
Follow Europarama on Instagram @europarama
Get in touch with Giuseppe Porcaro on twitter @porcarorama
Edited by Stefano MontaliWitness is a project by SciFi Economics Lab supported by EIT Climate-KIC and Nordisk Kulturfond
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Missing episodes?
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We explore the fictional academic discipline of aethnography - the study of the behavior of humans engaged in mutual interaction - which has a solid tradition in the universe of Witness.
Giuseppe and Alberto are joined by Amelia Hassoun, senior researcher and lead ethnographer at Edgeryders.
For this season, Europarama joins forces with Edgeryders and their Science Fiction Economics Lab as they had an incredible idea. Instead of writing academic papers, they decided to channel out-of-the box economic research by building the world of Witness.
Witness is a fictional city floating in a post-climate change Planet Earth, where people are organised by districts each experimenting a different social contract and a different economic model, but all of them connected by being constrained in that floating space.
About Aethnography in Witness
Aethnography is the study of the behavior of humans engaged in mutual interaction. It explores the phenomena that those interactions give rise to, taking into account the point of view of the interactants themselves and maintaining a stance of openness to evidence of different kinds and coming from different directions, known as epistemic pluralism.
While all social sciences are taught in the education establishments of Witness, aethnographic thinking plays a special role in informing much of decision-making, both in business and public policy.
Aethnography is applied to the three domains of high theory, applied analysis and action.
Aethnographers engaging in high theory are called theors. They reflect on general patterns and cross-domain intuition, invoking mostly the principle of the chemical wedding.
Aethnographers deploying on the ground to understand a concrete, situated set of issues are called augurs. They immerse themselves into a river of observables, from which they extract intersubjective meaning. They invoke mainly the principle of the pluriversity.
Aethnographers who leave their research institutions to engage in direct action take on the title of incanters. Invoking the principle of the broken tower, they shift to working in favour of a particular outcome: a reform, the starting up of a successful company, a military campaign.
An accomplished aethnographer is expected to have covered all three roles at least once during her career.
Witness is an open-source fictional world. You are encouraged to contribute to its making or to freely use it for your artistic or research projects.
Join in: https://scifieconomics.world/
This podcast is brought to you by Are We Europe, a border-breaking media trying to bridge the gaps in European culture and identity.
You can become an Are We Europe member and connect with storytellers across the continent starting at €4 a month. Just go to areweeurope.com/member and help Are We Europe build a new media for a changing continent.
Follow Europarama on Instagram @europarama
Get in touch with Giuseppe Porcaro on twitter @porcarorama
Edited by Stefano MontaliWitness is a project by SciFi Economics Lab supported by EIT Climate-KIC and Nordisk Kulturfond
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In this episode, Giuseppe and Alberto, together with guest Hugi Ásgeirsson, sail through a sector of the fictional world Witness known as Avantgrid. Hugi is one of the co-directors of Edgeryders and director of blivande - a participatory culture hub in Stockholm.
For this season, Europarama joins forces with Edgeryders and their Science Fiction Economics Lab as they had an incredible idea. Instead of writing academic papers, they decided to channel out-of-the box economic research by building the world of Witness.
Witness is a fictional city floating in a post-climate change Planet Earth, where people are organised by districts each experimenting a different social contract and a different economic model, but all of them connected by being constrained in that floating space.
Avantgrid is a large archipelago Distrikt between Assembly and Libria. Originally a zone of Libria, built to cater to an exclusive, high-income clientele, it fractured after the collapse of a geoengineering company left the ownership of the archipelago in dispute. Avantgrid is the only Distrikt in Witness that is not connected to the Harvest grid. In contrast to the mostly urban other Distrikts of Witness, Avantgrid is a largely rural Distrikt which even contains patches of uninhabited wilderness. Of the 1.1 million inhabitants of Avantgrid, 150.000 live in Akur, its only urban zone. There are 149 islands in the archipelago; outside of Akur, boundaries are being made and remade all the time, and new islands are under construction by various parties within Avantgrid.
The Avantgrid economy is highly cyclical, closer to zero-waste than anything else on Witness; in fact, some Cantons import waste from other Distrikts - especially electronic - to repair, rebuild, and to extract materials. Avantgrid attitudes towards waste have been compared to the water beliefs of the sand-nomads in the pre-Sundering religious text Dune.
Witness is an open-source fictional world. You are encouraged to contribute to its making or to freely use it for your artistic or research projects.
Join in: https://scifieconomics.world/
This podcast is brought to you by Are We Europe, a border-breaking media trying to bridge the gaps in European culture and identity.
You can become an Are We Europe member and connect with storytellers across the continent starting at €4 a month. Just go to areweeurope.com/member and help Are We Europe build a new media for a changing continent.
Follow Europarama on Instagram @europarama
Get in touch with Giuseppe Porcaro on twitter @porcarorama
Edited by Stefano MontaliWitness is a project by SciFi Economics Lab supported by EIT Climate-KIC and Nordisk Kulturfond
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The Covenant is religious institution Distrikt of Witness, tracing its history back to the grand powers of Roman Catholicism.
For this season, Europarama joins forces with Edgeryders and their Science Fiction Economics Lab as they had an incredible idea. Instead of writing academic papers, they decided to channel out-of-the box economic research by building the world of Witness.
Witness is a fictional city floating in a post-climate change Planet Earth, where people are organised by districts each experimenting a different social contract and a different economic model, but all of them connected by being constrained in that floating space.
The Covenant is perhaps the least-understood among all the major Distrikts of Witness. Notable visitors have describe it alternatively as "a kind of feudal paradise" or a "fascist religious hegemony" or "a work of art". As always, the truth lies somewhere in between.
The Covenant is indeed a religious institution, tracing itself back to the grand powers of Roman Catholicism. Broadly united under the Officium Auctoritatis Summae - loosely rendered as "the Office of the Highest Authority", and generally shortened to "Auctoritatis", it is possibly the single greatest concentration of material wealth on Witness. Magnificent churches stud the landscape, surrounded by carefully planned farms and estates; buildings of singularly brutalist art nouveau style line the streets of Hyborean, the 'center' sprawled around the Officium.A unique feature of The Covenant’s economy is the strong role played by monasteries and other religious institutions. While by no mean numerically prevalent, these institutions tend to be over-represented among the most advanced, most successful operations. This observation led economist Malivalaya Nut to describe The Covenant as a dual economy, where two sets of economic agents with completely different objective functions co-exist.
In a series of empirical investigation of The Covenant’s economy, Nut discovered a pattern: the economic activity of religious institutions tends to be amplified by businesses that are legally part of the secular economy, but have evolved for taking advantage of the turbulence created by the existence of the religious institutions themselves – for example lifting innovations invented in the monasteries and re-engineering them for secular markets.Witness is an open-source fictional world. You are encouraged to contribute to its making or to freely use it for your artistic or research projects. Join in: https://scifieconomics.world/
This podcast is brought to you by Are We Europe, a border-breaking media trying to bridge the gaps in European culture and identity.
You can become an Are We Europe member and connect with storytellers across the continent starting at €4 a month. Just go to areweeurope.com/member and help Are We Europe build a new media for a changing continent.
Follow Europarama on Instagram @europarama
Get in touch with Giuseppe Porcaro on twitter @porcarorama
Edited by Stefano Montali
Witness is a project by SciFi Economics Lab supported by EIT Climate-KIC and Nordisk Kulturfond
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Hygge is the first Distrikt of Witness. It was initially meant to be the " nervous system of Witness." The political history of Hygge begins with the founding of Witness itself.
For this season, Europarama joins forces with Edgeryders and their Science Fiction Economics Lab as they had an incredible idea. Instead of writing academic papers, they decided to channel out-of-the box economic research by building the world of Witness.
Witness is a fictional city floating in a post-climate change Planet Earth, where people are organised by districts each experimenting a different social contract and a different economic model, but all of them connected by being constrained in that floating space.
In this episode we explore Hygge with co-hosts Giuseppe Porcaro, Alberto Cottica and Joriam Ramos - author, networks specialist, and proud owner of a sci-fi YouTube channel.
Hygge went through a tumultuous time after the Zero-Day Fracture set in motion a chain of events that would see Distrikts seceding and throwing aside the careful top-down planning engine that Hygge was designed to be.
Today, Hygge is a democratic socialist structure, with a military presence left over from the short but bloody history of the Marches and the Distrikts that broke off. It is still an emblem of power, the seat of many debates for representatives, and boasts perhaps the single largest peacekeeping presence in Witness. Outside of the the Library of St. Benedict in the Covenant, Hygge is the only Distrikt truly critical to the State Machine’s existence, as it houses key hardware, along with CIVICSMOD, a multi-distrikt team that operates the machine.
You are encouraged to contribute to its making or to freely use it for your artistic or research projects. Join in: https://scifieconomics.world/This podcast is brought to you by Are We Europe, a border-breaking media trying to bridge the gaps in European culture and identity. You can become an Are We Europe member and connect with storytellers across the continent starting at €4 a month. Just go to areweeurope.com/member and help Are We Europe build a new media for a changing continent.
Follow Europarama on Instagram @europarama
Get in touch with Giuseppe Porcaro on twitter @porcarorama
Edited by Stefano Montali
Witness is a project by SciFi Economics Lab supported by EIT Climate-KIC and Nordisk Kulturfond
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In this episode, we sail to the Witness - an open-source fictional world exploring the future of economy. Giuseppe Porcaro and Alberto Cottica, your guides for the season, along with Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, a science fiction author and Architect of Witness, take you there.
For this season, Europarama joins forces with Edgeryders and their Science Fiction Economics Lab as they had an incredible idea. Instead of writing academic papers, they decided to channel out-of-the box economic research by building the world of Witness.
Witness is a fictional city floating in a post-climate change Planet Earth, where people are organised by districts each experimenting a different social contract and a different economic model, but all of them connected by being constrained in that floating space.
Witness is an open-source fictional world. You are encouraged to contribute to its making or to freely use it for your artistic or research projects. Join in: https://scifieconomics.world/
This podcast is brought to you by Are We Europe, a border-breaking media trying to bridge the gaps in European culture and identity. You can become an Are We Europe member and connect with storytellers across the continent starting at €4 a month. Just go to areweeurope.com/member and help Are We Europe build a new media for a changing continent.
Follow Europarama on Instagram @europarama
Get in touch with Giuseppe Porcaro on twitter @porcarorama
Edited by Stefano Montali
Witness is a project by SciFi Economics Lab supported by EIT Climate-KIC and Nordisk Kulturfond
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For this season, Europarama joins forces with Edgeryders and their Science Fiction Economics Lab by building the world of Witness - a fictional city floating in a post-climate change Planet Earth. On Witness, people are organised by districts, each experimenting a different social contract and economic model. Witness is an open-source fictional world. You are encouraged to contribute to its making or to freely use it for your artistic or research projects. Join in: https://scifieconomics.world
This podcast is brought to you by Are We Europe, a border-breaking media trying to bridge the gaps in European culture and identity. You can become an Are We Europe member and connect with storytellers across the continent starting at €4 a month. Just go to areweeurope.com/member and help Are We Europe build a new media for a changing continent.
Hosted by Giuseppe Porcaro (Twitter: @porcarorama) and Alberto CotticaFollow Europarama on Instagram @europarama
Supported by EIT-Climate KIC and Nordisk Kulturfond -
In this episode we explore, with Julijonas Urbonas, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, the so-called Karman Line, at 100 Km above us. What new politics, culture, and art can be conceived when the law of physics as we know them get completely subverted?
This episode was originally foreseen to be recorded live, in the frame of the Culture Forum of Kaunas, European Capital of Culture 2022. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the Forum has been moved online. It takes place on 20-22 May 2022 and can be accessed on https://forumas.kaunas2022.eu
Episode Guest: Julijonas Urbonas – artist, designer, researcher, engineer, founder of the Lithuanian Space Agency. Associate professor and former prorector at Vilnius Academy of Arts (VAA). Former CEO of an amusement park in Klaipėda. Lithuanian representative at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Currently he is about to defend his PhD thesis on gravitational aesthetics at the Royal College of Art, London.
Composer of hypergravitational piano project: Gailė Griciutė
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Why should it be unscientific to think about the future? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to take a critical scientific stance in thinking about the future? There is no contradiction in being scientific and turning towards the future—towards what is not yet known.
Wouldn’t it be scientific, in the best sense of the word, if researchers examined utopias and investigated, with the best available knowledge, why they cannot become true?
The Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) offered scientists a platform for imagining utopias beyond the usual research. The visionary stories address the opportunities and challenges that digital technologies present for society in the future of 2040. And they have been collected in a book available on: https://twentyforty.hiig.de/
In this episode we have spoken with Bronwen Deacon, coordinator of the project a the von Humboldt Institute, Gianluca Sgueo, Policy Analyst - EU Parliament and New York University Global Media Seminar Professor, and Isabella Hermann, scientific coordinator on Artificial Intelligence at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
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Pandemics have been a running theme throughout science fiction and many cross-genre movies, from zombies to aliens. But what happens when Europe (and the world) has become a huge set of a pandemic, and it is not a science fiction, even if it closely looks like it?
Giuseppe Porcaro is in conversation with Anthony Straeger, the director of the Berlin Sci-fi Film Festival, and Isabella Hermann, political scientist and expert of A.I. and ethics.
A (partial) watch list of the movies we speak about in this episode:
Contagion (2011)The Host (2006)12 Monkeys (1995)28 Days Later (2002)Andromeda Strain (1971)It comes at night (2017)Outbreak (1995)Quarantine (2008)Virus (1980)Children of men (2006)
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Discover how the last King of the Belgians becomes the first Emperor of Europe. Giuseppe Porcaro meets film director Jessica Woodworth to discuss her latest movie, The Barefoot Emperor.
After suffering a gunshot wound to the ear during an unfortunate incident in Sarajevo, the King of the Belgians wakes up on a Croatian island, once Tito’s famed summer residence. While he tries to escape from the island to save his Kingdom, an envoy arrives announcing that the King has been chosen to become the first Emperor of a nationalist Nova Europa. Fed up with others determining his destiny, the King takes matters into his own hands.
The Barefoot Emperor is a 2019 Belgian comedy film directed by Jessica Woodworth and Peter Brosens. It was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. It is a sequel to King of the Belgian, a 2016 mockumentary by the same directors.There are multiple possible futures. And the future that will come about will spring out of choices and actions.
Europe needs imagination.
Europarama is a podcast series about science fiction and the future of Europe by Giuseppe Porcaro, brought to you by the Are We Europe podcasting family. Europarama is a follow-up project to DISCO SOUR, a novel about Europe and democracy in the age of algorithms.
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In this special episode Giuseppe Porcaro, Alberto Cottica and Nadia EN discuss the Science Fiction Economics Lab on November 11th from 14:30 to 19:00 (with after party) in Brussels, Belgium.
Be among the first 4 people to share this episode from the Europarama Facebook page and win a free ticket for the keynote of Cory Doctorow.
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The Science Fiction Economics Lab will bring together SF authors, economists, technologists, activists and just ordinary citizens who care to envision different economic systems.
The Lab aspires to creating a template for re-energizing society’s capacity for designing paradigm-level reform; help raise the awareness of the climate crisis as a carrier of opportunity and hope, and not just of disruption and dismay; and embolden would-be reformers, especially in Europe. T
To make this project happen, Edgeryders launched a crowd-funding campaign. Click here to find out how you can contribute and become a part of it: http://bit.ly/ScifiEconLab
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EVENT PROGRAM:
November 11, 2019, Multiple locations + Livestreaming14.30 to 16.30 Workshop with the Extinction Rebellion: often abbreviated to XR, is an ecological social movement that claims civil disobedience by relying on non-violent actions to encourage governments to act against climate change and its consequences. Participants will learn how to mobilize for a more humane, equitable and greener economy. Location: Kano, Boulevard Barthélémy 20, 1000 Brussels
18:00 - 20:00 Two Keynote Talks: Les Riches-Claires Cultural Centre, Rue des Riches Claires 24, Brussels 1000
Cory Doctorow - award-winning author, activist and science fiction journalist, co-editor of Boing Boing and author of novels for young adults such as Homeland, Pirate Cinema and Little Brother and adult novels such as Rapture of the nerds and Makers. He is the former European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founder of the UK Open Rights Group. He has been recognized as one of the most influential people on the web by Forbes Magazine.
Kirsten Dunlop - CEO of EIT Climate-KIC, the EU's largest public-private partnership, responsible for tackling climate change through innovation by deeply decarbonising cities, while addressing land use, agriculture and industrial manufacturing, and providing financing. It works with 280 partners from academia, business, the public sector and NGOs, and has supported more than 2,000 start-ups to date, mobilising more than €2.5 billion in funding.
21.30: Party
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In this season finale, Giuseppe Porcaro looks back at the experiment of Europarama together with a stellar line-up of contributors that join in to explore the value of science fiction as a method to dive into Europe's futures.
Cory Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books.
Srećko Horvat Born in Croatia, he is a philosopher and and activist. Srećko is regarded as one of the central figures of the new left in post-Yugoslavia. He has authored more than ten books, including What Does Europe Want?, The Radicality of Love, and Poetry from the Future.
Niels Daalgard is a danish academic and science fiction critic whose PhD research into Danish science fiction is the first on such a topic to be funded by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities. Dalgaard is science fiction reviewer for the newspaper Politiken and editor of the critical journal Proxima (since 1981).
Laura Horn is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business of the Roskilde University in Denmark. Her main research area is Global Political Economy, with particular attention to the regional manifestation of these structures and processes in the context of European integration.
Ian Manners is professor at the Department of Political Science of the University of Copenhagen.works at the nexus of critical social theory and the study of the European Union in planetary politics. His current research interest looks at the EU and planetary politics at the intersections of global society, economy, environment, conflict, and politics.
Marije Martens is one of the co-founders of Are We Europe, a collective of European journalist and content creators. She’s the lead designer of the magazine and has always had an interest in the interplay between design, storytelling, nationalism and Europe. She also loves podcasts and stories.
Mick ter Reehorst is the managing director and co-founder of Are We Europe. Mick has studied journalism and European studies in Amsterdam and Paris, so it all makes sense, even though he’s mostly occupied with the entrepreneurial side of things. Also, he thinks that Europe needs a new narrative, because this is not where things are supposed to be headed. Oh, and he loves podcasts.
...and yours, faithfully, Giuseppe Porcaro author of DISCO SOUR, creator and producer of Europarama, head of communications of Bruegel, lover, and dreamer.
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We are around the time when we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Moon landing. And it is not a coincidence that for this latest space time exploration of europarama we would like to take you all in an interplanetary journey. And imagine a Europe that expands towards the outer space.
After all, the science fiction dreams of going to the other sky objects started here in Europe, in 1865 with Jules Verne’s "From the Earth to the Moon". Even if even Jules Verne imagined that the first bullet to be shoot from our planet would have taken place in the United States.
If we’ll have to imagine a deep future interplanetary European Union, how this would look like?
Richard-Molard is an author working and writing from Brussels. Magna Carta Galactica is his first Sci-Fi Novel but Gabriel is a regular columnist for the French and German press. He is born in Montpellier and has worked in Strasbourg, Berlin, Cologne and Brussels. In Magna Carta Galactica he works about his primary passions: European Politics and Space discovery.
Giuseppe Porcaro is the author of DISCO SOUR, a novel about Europe and democracy in the age of algorithms, among the winners of the Altiero Spinelli Prize for Outrech of the European Union in 2018. Giuseppe is interested in how the intersection between technology and politics is moving towards uncharted territories in the future. He also focuses on narrative-building and political representations in the European Union. He works as the head of communications for Bruegel.
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Where politics and democracy are heading into the future?
It is a theme that has run throughout the history of science fiction. Something that already in 1921, Yevgeny Zamyatin tried to imagine in his novel “We”, for example, and later developed in different directions by Orwell, Huxley and the likes. The following quote from “We” recalls the tone and the imagery of these reflections about the future of democracy, back in the past. A sort of archeology of the Future.
*It goes without saying that this does not resemble the disordered, disorganized elections of the Ancients, when – it seems funny to say it – the result of an election was not known beforehand. Building a government on totally unaccounted – for happenstance, blindly – what could be more senseless? And yet still, it turns out, it took centuries to understand this. *
Malka Older condensed a reflection on the topic in her Centenal Cycle, a series of cyberpunk technothrillers beginning with Infomocracy. Her premise is set in a not so distant future ad it portrays a world governed by micro-democracies. Countries have been replaced by districts (called centenals) of 100,000 people, and the entire world turns out to vote once a decade for their local government. The political party elected to the most centenals becomes the Supermajority, setting policy and direction for the world at large. Needless to say, the stakes are high as a new election approaches. In this episode we will start our space-time exploration of today with that premise.
How would Europe look like under Infomocracy?
Malka Older is a writer, humanitarian worker, and holds a PhD at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations at science po in Paris studying governance and disasters. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she has more than eight years of experience in humanitarian aid and development, and has responded to complex emergencies and natural disasters in Uganda, Darfur, Indonesia, Japan, and Mali. Her first novel Infomocracy has been published by Tor.com in 2016, starting the so-far trilogy of the centenal cycle, which comprises Null States and her latest State Tectonics. She is one of the nominees for the prestigious Hugo Award for 2019 and she recently published for the New York Times in their series op-eds from the future.
Giuseppe Porcaro is the author of DISCO SOUR, a novel about Europe and democracy in the age of algorithms, among the winners of the Altiero Spinelli Prize for Outrech of the European Union in 2018. Giuseppe is interested in how the intersection between technology and politics is moving towards uncharted territories in the future. He also focuses on narrative-building and political representations in the European Union. He works as the head of communications for Bruegel.
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This episode of Europarama has been recorded at the University of Roskilde in Denmark, during the workshop fEUtures: science fiction and the future of Europe on 4th June 2019. During the workshop academics and science fiction authors discussed science fiction as a methodological tool in European Studies.
Giuseppe Porcaro had the chance to have a long conversation with Michal Hvorecky and discuss the Europe of the future described in his latest novel, Troll (2017), where trolling factories become pandemic and where the government controls the people by spewing out hate 24 hours a day. You can read an excerpt in English of the book here.
The conversation also touched the role of science fiction as a political tool from the personal experience of Michal since back in the days of Czechoslovakia to the current political environment of contemporary Slovak republic, giving an important testimony for the listeners of Europarama.
Michal Hvorecky is the author of Troll (2017) and many other novels. His books have been translated into German, Polish, Czech and Italian. Translations of his fiction and journalism have appeared in print in Germany, the United Kingdom, Slovenia, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. The novel Plush was dramatised and performed in the Prague theatre Na zabradli and in Schauspiel Hannover in Germany. In addition, Hvorecky writes regularly for various newspapers and magazines. He has been awarded several literary prizes and fellowships, including the Literary Colloquium in Berlin, MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, Goethe Institut in Munich, and an International Writing Program in the United States. The author also contributes to Slovak newspapers such as daily SME. His upcoming utopian novel called Tahiti will be published in 2020.
Giuseppe Porcaro is the author of DISCO SOUR, a novel about Europe and democracy in the age of algorithms, among the winners of the Altiero Spinelli Prize for Outrech of the European Union in 2018. Giuseppe is interested in how the intersection between technology and politics is moving towards uncharted territories in the future. He also focuses on narrative-building and political representations in the European Union. He works as the head of communications for Bruegel.
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Jacque Fresco was an American futurist and self-described social engineerb he directed the Venus Project and advocated global implementation of a socioeconomic system which he referred to as a "resource-based economy". The Venus Project proposes an alternative vision of what the future can be if we apply what we already know in order to achieve a sustainable new world civilization. It calls for a straightforward redesign of our culture in which the age-old inadequacies of war, poverty, hunger, debt and unnecessary human suffering are viewed not only as avoidable, but as totally unacceptable.
In this episode Giuseppe Porcaro speaks with Andrei Ivanov, who is a passionate of Fresco's utopian vision, and together they design The Europa Project, inspired by Fresco's.
How a future Europe would look like if mobile phones would be out of fashion, people will prefer to ride horses, play theatre in the street, and robots will work for all of us?
Andrei Ivanov, born in Estonia in 1971, knows, in his own words, “all the ups and downs of a Soviet education”, as he grew up in “a typical proletarian Russian family”. Although he sees himself as part of the Russian literary tradition, he identifies Estonia as his home country and his creative point of departure. After graduating from the Tallinn Pedagogical University (now Tallinn University), where he wrote his thesis on the language of Vladimir Nabokov, Ivanov briefly worked as a teacher, moved to Scandinavia and explored Denmark for a number of years, studied several languages, and wrote his first novel. His Russian-language novels Hanuman’s Journey to Lolland (2009), Bizarre (2013), and Confession of a Lunatic (2015) recount his experiences in Scandinavia. Hanuman’s Journey to Lolland was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize (2012) and won the Cultural Endowment of Estonia’s Prize for Russian-Language Literature (2010). It was first published in Russian in Tallinn in 2009; was released in Moscow in 2010; was translated into Estonian (2012), German (2012) and French (2016); and was staged at Thalia Theater (Hamburg, 2014) by Ene-Liis Semper and Tiit Ojasoo of Theater NO99.
Giuseppe Porcaro is the author of DISCO SOUR, a novel about Europe and democracy in the age of algorithms, among the winners of the Altiero Spinelli Prize for Outrech of the European Union in 2018. Giuseppe is interested in how the intersection between technology and politics is moving towards uncharted territories in the future. He also focuses on narrative-building and political representations in the European Union. He works as the head of communications for Bruegel.
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Uchronia refers to a hypothetical or fictional time-period of our world, in contrast to altogether fictional lands or worlds. A concept similar to alternate history but different in the manner that uchronic times are not easily defined, mainly placed in some distant or unspecified point in time, sometimes reminiscent of a constructed world.
In this episode Giuseppe Porcaro , Julie Novakova and Vilma Kadlečková experiment with the genre and they explore a universe where noble families still rule over Europe, feudalism never fell, and perhaps the Austria-Hungary Empire would still be alive. But most importantly, we are in the future, and royal families run the businesses, including space stations, and top notch research to find the source of eternal youth.
Vilma Kadlečková has written the comprehensive pentalogy Mycelium, a complex work in which humanity is merely a less advanced species within the universe. The majority of her works belong to the “Legends of Argenite” cycle. These are tales on the boundary of science fiction and fantasy, mapping the future history of the universe, which is similar to ours, but which contains “argenite”: a fictional mineral serving as a source of energy with psychotronic powers. Vilma received the Book of the Year award from the Czech Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, and the Best Original Czech and Slovak Book of the Year 2013.
Julie Novakova is not only an author and a translator but also an evolutionary biologist and takes a keen interest in planetary science. She has published short fiction in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog and elsewhere. Some of her works have been also translated into Chinese, Romanian, Estonian, German, Filipino and Portuguese. She received the Encouragement Award of the European science fiction and fantasy society in 2013, the Aeronautilus award for the best Czech short story of 2014 and 2015, and for the best novel of 2015. She’s currently polishing her first novel in English and translating more Czech stories into English.
Giuseppe Porcaro is the author of DISCO SOUR, a novel about Europe and democracy in the age of algorithms, among the winners of the Altiero Spinelli Prize for Outrech of the European Union in 2018. Giuseppe is interested in how the intersection between technology and politics is moving towards uncharted territories in the future. He also focuses on narrative-building and political representations in the European Union. He works as the head of communications for Bruegel.
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People who do a lot of gardening probably know what “rhizome” is in botanical terms. It is a kind of plant that pops out of the ground over an expanding area, giving the impression that many separate plants are emerging in close proximity to one another, but in fact these ostensibly individual “plants” are parts of one big plant, and are interconnected under the ground. It has a distinct philosophical meaning, too, which is associated with the famous French duo, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s work “rhizome” is roughly the philosophical counterpart of the botanical term, suggesting that many things in the world are rhizomes, or rhizomatically interconnected, although such connections are not always visible. Animals or insects that live symbiotically appear to be an obvious example, such as the little birds that clean crocodiles’ teeth when these reptiles bask in the sun with their huge jaws open: instead of eating the birds, the crocodiles let them feed on the bits of meat, etc, between their teeth — their teeth are cleaned, and the birds are fed, in this way forming a rhizome. After all, when one sees them separately, few people would guess that their species-economy is rhizomatically conjoined.
In this episode Sabrina Calvo and Giuseppe Porcaro imagine a future of Europe as a sort of rhizome, where traditions, instead of nations are interconnected, where binary definitions are not able to explain connection within diversity. And by doing so, they also celebrate the death of dystopia.
Sabrina Calvo is an award-winning writer and game designer. She likes to think of her work as a thoughtful, sensitive anarchism. She lives a quiet, focused life between Montreal and Paris. Her latest novel, Toxoplasma, won the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in 2018, which is something similar to the Hugo Awards for France. Toxoplasma is set in a future where the Internet as we know disappeared, the city of Montreal is besieged by the federal army and survives as a sort of anarchist commune, and the world is kind of falling apart.
Giuseppe Porcaro is the author of DISCO SOUR, a novel about Europe and democracy in the age of algorithms, among the winners of the Altiero Spinelli Prize for Outrech of the European Union in 2018. Giuseppe is interested in how the intersection between technology and politics is moving towards uncharted territories in the future. He also focuses on narrative-building and political representations in the European Union. He works as the head of communications for Bruegel.
Europarama is a podcast series about science fiction and the future of Europe by Giuseppe Porcaro, brought to you by the Are We Europe podcasting family.
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