Practical Utopia from Afar

 While we hope rarely to need a doctor, we do need a farmer three times a day. And with 90% of everything coming by ship, it seems we are immersed in a world of food and cargo, two parts of our culture that are hidden from view. Over the past weekend we have dived into these invisible and unknown fields with presentations and futuring exercises exploring the way food and cargo has been, is and might be. On Friday we enjoyed a public talk about Fair Food & Clean Cargo, we will report on the exercises soon.

On Friday evening Greta Muscat Azzopardi from The Amber Spark brought together three local and empassioned voices to speak about the Maltese and international elements of food and cargo.

[Announcement]: Final Malta-Activities / Letzte Malta-Aktivitäten

Cabinet of Futures being on display since 24th of August in the second floor of Ċentru San Ġużepp Ħaddiem 71, Triq Bwieraq, Birkirkara (which is really difficult to find if you don’t use the directions given here in this link..) will be open for only a few more last days …

More Images to be found here

Time’s Up’s Public Relations…

… for more than 20 years we have, according to a good friend and expert in the field of communications, always been “Ambiguous and Incomplete”. Some might see the correlation with the title of our recently published book….

Students imagining Futures

We have had another „vision-rich“ day yesterday. Starting off with almost 80 secondary school students visiting Cabinet of Futures in the morning we saw wonderful ideas emerging around how we can walk towards a cleaner and healthier future, encompassing everything between more pragmatic up to highly fabulating visions including technological inventions bringing up new materials instead of plastics for packaging up to unicorns magically reforesting woodlands.

Cabinet of Futures in Context

When we first arrived here in Malta over two years ago, we met a wonderful range of people, from poets and publishers to curators and academics. Some of them we have hardly seen again, others have helped us create a series of events, projects, exhibitions and workshops over the past two years that have taught us a lot about what we can do as well as opening, apparently, a lof of other eyes to what is possible and even preferable.

Improved Quality of Life in possible futures

The Practical Utopian Directorate has opened it’s doors for the second time while Cabinet of Futures is set up in Malta! During the weekend we have been facilitating two separate workshops focussing on „Quality of Life / Small is Beautiful“.

After getting attuned to some economic perspectives on „Small is Beautiful“ by Marie Briguglio and Margarete Camillero Fenech at Studio Solipsis (organised by KOPIN Malta) on Friday we continued with the facilitation of „A Practical Utopian Moment“ on Saturday and with „An Afternoon Spent in a Practical Utopian State of Mind“ on Sunday.

Gross Domestic Product shortfalls

 

In the context of our current round of activities within the Cabinet of Futures (a Valletta 2018 project) we had, in close cooperation with Kopin Malta and Studio Solipsis, the pleasure to experience an excellent entry point to the subject we are concentrating upon in the next couple of days:

Quality of Life // Small is Beautiful.

Both speakers, Dr. Marie Briguglio and Margaret Camilleri Fenech, presented inspiring speeches circulating around alternative and complementary indexes to our current economic system being measured as and in GDP (gross domestic product). Even though GDP, when introduced, was never intended to measure the welfare of nations, it become _the_ dogma of today.

Malta the next and almost the last

+++ deutsche Version weiter unten +++

Time’s Up is back to Malta! As part of our exhibition Cabinet of Futures, a project within the Valletta 2018 European Capital of Culture we cordially invite all people in and around Malta to another round of “Thinking out loud about possible futures“.

Fast Futures

A bit less than a decade ago we were chatting with Adam Hyde, who at that stage was still closely involved in the FLOSS Manuals project. There the team was developing open source manuals for open source software, creating solid documentation by bringing programmers, users and other interested parties together to write a useful manual. A long process, valuable, but hard to keep moving sometimes. Adam was excited because of a profound misunderstanding. He believed that he had been told that some people had gotten together to write a book in a week, or maybe it was 10 days. A book! That quickly! So much easier than months of editing, shuttling versions around and waiting for someone to edit and pass it on.

Cabinet of Futures – Futuring Exercise #1

A video documentation about our first block of Futuring Exercises within Cabinet of Futures – a Valletta 2018 project as part of the Cultural Programme – is online! With special thanks to Elisa Unger – again spending time with us to film and edit in order to give an impression about what has been collectively achieved. The workshop was undertaken with an inspiring and great group of participants , who thought, talked about and sketched taking “Radical Recycling / Circular Economy” in possible futures into consideration.

“Was und wer ist Time’s Up”

Interview anhören – in Deutsch

Sigrid Ecker von Radio FRO ist in unsere Werkstatt gekommen und hat für das FROzine eine der für uns wohl schwierigsten Frage gestellt: „Was (und wer) ist Time’s Up?“

Wissen wollte Sigi das, weil Time’s Up ja noch immer ein Jubiläum feiert – der letze und dritte Akt – gekennzeichnet durch die Publikation „Lückenhaft & Kryptisch“ – illustriert von Silke Müller, ist nun vollzogen – das Buch inzwischen erhältlich und tatsächlich eine große Freude für uns!

Bekommen kann man das Buch in der Buchhandlung Alex in Linz, verlegt wurde es über revolver-publishing in Berlin und wenn man einfach bei uns anfragt (info@timesup.org) dann schicken wir es gerne zu, bzw. übergeben es auch persönlich.

 

 

Public Appearances in autumn lined out

Even though we will be spending most of our time with scheming, planing, developing and researching for the rest of the year – a few moments we will show up in public as well as we invite you over to our labs – which are hosting new toys!