Visionaries and ‘envisioners’ do not only occur in history books. Some alive today work relentlessly, rigorously, step by step, on a day to day basis to bring their grand visions to reality. Some are more successful in this than others, some more utopian than others, yet all believers in the possibility of a better tomorrow and a clear vision of their own on how this ought to be.

Engineer, designer and futurist Jacque Fresco (born 1916), writes, draws, plans and constructs the future out of his home-based Research Centre in Florida. A child of the Great Depression, he is an everlasting optimist and strong believer in man’s ability to change the world, to change society, especially in view of today’s many challenges for tomorrow. With enthusiasm Fresco illustrates and shares his holistic visions of another tomorrow, of possible worlds ahead, worlds in which the economy is based upon managed resources instead of scarcity/money, where cities are designed to operate in a sustainable way, where man’s designs and behaviour are energy efficient, where automated and autonomous technologies are omnipresent etc.

Taking singularly, many of the man’s designs and illustrations are reminiscent of scifi-scenery. Set on a stage of their own, the designs, like the sketches, descriptions and visualizations of many visionaries, have the utopianist’s tabula rasa touch to them. Yet contextualized by Fresco’s texts, interviews, lectures, and beyond the technosurface there are a set of ideas and systems that range quite a bit further than their appearance.

The Venus Project, subtitled The redesign of a culture illustrates well Fresco’s scope and vision-span. It does more than talk about technologies over the horizon or utopian city design, digging into the larger societal fabric of Fresco’s vision on today and tomorrow’s world.

Award winning filmmaker William Gazecki recently created a film about Jacque’s life and ideas, titled Future by Design (DVD release planned for next week).
Be sure also to check out the other fascinating video material available online (e.g. here or Jacque’s mySpace page ).

Related posts:

1. art, science, future: Jacques Charlier
2. vegetal city
3. utopias, exhibitions, tomorrowlands

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 at 15:19 and is filed under arts, design, envision, society, visionary, visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.