Neotopia

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Neotopia is a bilingual atlas by the Swiss graphic artist Manuela Pfrunder (* 1979) from 2002, which presents a utopian , just and egalitarian world.

content

In the first part of the atlas a utopian continuation of the creation story is told: people were dissatisfied when they became aware of the great injustices in the world. Envy, resentment and wars were the result. Over time, however, it was possible to make the goods available to everyone in the world. As a result, humanity rebuilt the world in such a way that every single person owned the houses, fields, forests, deserts, lakes, glaciers and sea areas to which he was entitled in his or her place of residence. Even the sun was divided into six parts so that all climatic conditions were identical . It became quiet on earth and peace returned, as people knew that they had everything that could be owned.

In the second part of the atlas, the author shows what such regular units would look like for every person: Each of the 6,442,450,944 people has a uniform square unit with an edge length of 291.5 m. Of this, however, only 29% is land, the rest is water. Most of the land consists of forest and wasteland, and a smaller part of productive arable and cultivated land. Examples are used to explain what this means in concrete terms for a person on such a utopian unit: he clears 16 square meters of rainforest annually, which will completely cut it down in 187 years; 8.5 kg of meat, 94 kg of wheat and 16 g of silk are produced per year; Every person suffers from hunger for 60 days a year, since they feed 40% of the grain production to animals; for this he receives US $ 6.62 in development aid and at the same time spends US $ 125 on armaments; He can only require medical assistance for a maximum of 80 minutes per year; there is a newspaper every two weeks; there are 20 cm rails on each unit.

The data mentioned in the atlas are not fictitious, but were taken from statistical yearbooks of international organizations (e.g. Statistical Yearbook of the UNO 1999) and converted to an individual person.

Naturally, the atlas is only a snapshot. On the website (see web links), however, the world population is constantly being revised upwards. This naturally also reduces the unit that is available to everyone.

Cartographic aspects

Although every area that is available to a person differs in no way from the areas of all other people, the author designs a multi-level series of scales . First the earth's surface is divided into six - identical, of course - parts, which are named after the six suns Haky, Leso, Ofga, Raxs, Ulse and Viro. The world is then mentally mapped in four map series of different scales : the first map series consists of 1536 (6 × 256) square map sheets, the second of 393,216 (6 × 256 × 256), the third of 100,663,296 (6 × 256 × 256 × 256) and the fourth, finally, from as many sheets of cards (6 × 256 × 256 × 256 × 64) as there are units and people. Each map sheet (i.e. each unit and each individual person) has a unique code for localization, which consists of the name of the sun and four groups of digits and letters from a search grid. For example, the full location code for a unit is Ulse 1a 1a 11b 6f . Since all units look exactly the same, only one unit is shown in the second part of the atlas to represent all the others at a scale of 1: 1600.

Creation of the atlas

Manuela Pfrunder studied at the graphics class at the Lucerne School of Art and Design . Her thesis in 2000 on the topic of "Uniform" was entitled The Continuation of Creation . In doing so, she won the 2000 advancement award from the Swiss Association of Graphic Art (SGV) and the “ Willy Guhl Prize for Communication Design ” at the 2001 Swiss Design Prize . Building on this, the book project Neotopia was created , which was published by Limmat Verlag in Zurich in 2002 with the support of UNICEF . Neotopia has also been shown at exhibitions in Zurich, Berlin and Vienna.

Appreciation

By reducing the complexity and converting it to a single person, unimaginably large numbers become comprehensible for everyone, for example the volume of rice production, the area of ​​the annual rainforest loss, the amount of global armament expenditure or the flight routes covered. This shows in a playful way how our world is doing. The atlas is therefore only apparently an image of a utopia, because in fact the situation in the world around the turn of the millennium is shown. The topic «Uniform» is dealt with in a radically new way. The complete subdivision of the globe into square units according to the spherical geometry is not possible, but this does not reduce the statistical information.

literature

  • Neotopia: Atlas for equitable distribution of the world = Atlas of equitable distribution of the world . 2nd Edition. Zurich: Limmat-Verlag, 2003. ISBN 3-85791-405-X .

Web links