https://believermag.com/logger/the-cryptofuturist-and-the-new-tribal-labyrinth/
“I always say I’m a primitivist at heart, but technological progress, as much as it’s wrought our planet’s ruin, remains inextricably tied to culture with a capital C—something I can’t imagine living without. When I try to imagine my over-developed brain being sated by the kind of tribal, low-tech existence that primitivism implies, it seems impossible. Yet I wonder if there’s even a choice; if it isn’t our destiny as a species to die out, and become part of the mass extinction we’ve initiated. Or does our future lie in the utopian possibilities of technology, and an embrace of transhumanism—an evolutionary phase many argue we’re already entered?
These are questions the artist-designer Joep van Lieshout, and Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL), have grappled with for decades. From van Lieshout’s ambitious, if short-lived “free state”, AVL Ville, created in 2001 along Rotterdam’s harbor, which had its own currency, farm, water-purification system, and field hospital, to the more ominous SlaveCity (2005-2008), a fictional metropolis based on the model of concentration camps, and designed around principles of efficiency and profit, AVL’s experiments in idyllic self-sufficiency manifest a perpetual ambivalence.”
https://believermag.com/logger/the-cryptofuturist-and-the-new-tribal-labyrinth/