[-empyre-] From EPCOT to Celebration

[davin heckman]

This discussion of prototypes is fantastic, especially when you get
into the contemporary corporate cultural scene.  Everything could
potentially be a prototype!  A great example of the prototypical
zeitgeist can be signified in the transition of Sludge (sewage
sediment)-->Biosolid (a fertilizer)-->Compost (a "green" solution).
<http://www.prwatch.org/node/8885>.  And, of course there are a
wide-range of drugs that are prescribed for off-label use, which
follow a similar pattern: identify some substance that can be
patented, throw it at the public, and whatever happens, well that's
what it's for.  A third example might be the recent news of Republican
fund-raising strategies which seek to capitalize on the fragile
psychological states of the American public.  If I sound cynical, I
suppose I am.  In each case, what would otherwise be considered an
crisis is converted into an economic opportunity.  I suppose it's only
a matter of time before we start reading studies about the sunny (and
lucrative) side of post-traumatic stress disorder.  Maybe we could
teach kids that nuclear waste means that we might someday live in a
world where the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are real....  what some
nervous Nellies call "polluted groundwater," we call "fantasy juice."
On another level, de Certeau's discussion of "making do" is similar.
The key difference being who "makes do" with what material and for
what end.

There is a real question here about what is being prototyped.  At one
point in time, discrete objects were things that were considered
prototypes that could be thrown into an existing system and tested.
Increasingly, it seems like the prototypes are geared to test
individual and collective consciousness.  In other words, maybe we are
the  prototypes?  Being tested so that we can be effectively
processed, shrink-wrapped, labeled, bought and sold.

Not to plug my own work, but a while back I wrote something on
Disney's Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow, the EPCOT
Center theme park, and their planned community, Celebration, Florida.
Across these interpretations of social prototyping, you can see
radically different approaches, from a sort of fascist futurist
utopianism to a spectacular corporate imaginary to an applied attempt
at social engineering.  <http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/heckman.htm>
Another great discussion of this can be found in Helen Burgess'
discussion of Norman Bel Geddes:
<http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/futurama/index.html>.

Following Adrian Freed's discussion of antiergonomy and the
interrogation of the narrow, technocapitalist "progressive"
narrative...  might prototyping itself be "counter-progressive"
insofar as it attempts to moderate revolutionary change by always
channeling it through the very nexus within which the narrative of
progress has become a burden to people?  To attempt to make change
profitable to power is another way of denying change altogether (or at
least of allowing it to upend the social order).

Peace!

Davin Heckman