In May 2011 Derrick de Kerckhove asked me for a contribute to a video collection on some McLuhan’s selected statements (as you may remember in 2011 the 100th anniversary of McLuhan’s birth was celebrated). My video intervention, just a few minutes long, would have been showed during some public events together with other short videos referred to McLuhan’s sentences.
I found the project amusing and I was glad to participate. So I chose a statement to focus on in the video. In particular I loved “Tomorrow is our permanent address”, because it emphasizes the idea of the future as a declination of ourselves and as a typical human (symbolic) construct. A topic I had always been interested in and that I also discussed in some of my recent lectures on the evolution of the human culture. Finally Raffaella Rivi, a friend of mine and a famous video maker, accepted to make the movie and curated all the video shooting and editing phases. This video exists thanks to her fundamental help!
Since the video had a good success I added the english subtitles and now I share it.
Update: In 2012, with some colleagues and friends, we started from this idea about reasoning on the future to create the fivewordsforthefuture project.
From the “About” page:
[…] FiveWordsForTheFuture‘s main object is to help people to identify and understand what’s new, the innovation, and to imagine the future. However not in the sense of trying to divine and present some sort of an abstract, utopian or dystopian remote future – like magicians and astrologers do – but in the sense of helping people to focus their lives into a possible time which is going to come.
This project collects information and interviews with people who present five topics/ideas/statements they think are fundamental to deal with the future. This project has been a partner in some important events about innovation.
