utopian thinking is a practical matter
THE SUMMIT OF PRACTICAL UTOPIAS
Island of Brioni, Croatia, September 26–29
From practicalutopias.org
A fine group of participants representing a wide cross-section of contemporary utopian practices, has been selected to come to the beautifully bizarre Brioni Islands in Croatia. For four days they will engage in a reality game with its goal to share and play with practical ideas that have a potential to change the way we live together.
Practical Utopia is a reflection of the desire to change the current system of society by developing alternative proposals that outline the first practical steps towards long-term processes of change.
Practical Utopia insists on the necessity of Utopia as an intellectual concept interlinking the fantastical and the pragmatic in bringing about social, political and artistic change. The game aims to trigger longer-term thinking and utopian dreaming - beyond the constraints of Realpolitik.
The Brioni Summit will take the form of a reality game where game rules will define the interactions between our participants. And various sights and infrastructures on the Island will be turned into a playground that will support them to collaborate in novel ways. The set up of this game will free the participants from the norms and constraints of a classical summit.
Since 2005 YKON (ykon.org) has developed and tested various participatory formats like for example the YKON Game. (http://ykon.org/ykon_game.html) Based on their previous experience YKON has developed a site-specific game just for the Brioni Summit.
YKON's approach towards games was inspired by the World Game of wellknown utopian thinker Buckminster Fuller – by his own opinion this game was his most important contribution to our society. The World Game was created as a proposal for an alternate system of pedagogy: a game, rather than a curriculum, as the main platform of learning. It was intended as a tool to formulate competing, comprehensive design-science approaches to all the problems on planet earth.
The sizable cast of characters include peacekeepers, artists, performers, conflict managers, riot instigators, facilitators, tv broadcasters, educators, activists and theorists either Utopian by default, program or accident. They come from around the world, and one or two places not strictly on the map at all.
Among the confirmed participants are thus far Noora Aaltonen & Maiju Suomi (ukumbi.org), Fouad Asfour, Tina Auer & Tim Boykett (Time's Up), Đorđe Balmazović & Dragan Protić (Škart), Željko Blaće (qSPORT), Jon Brunberg (Utopian World Championship), Cecilia Carlsson (Non-Violent Communication), Teo Celakoski, Nik Gaffney & Maja Kuzmanovic (Fo.am), Gilles Fontolliet (Palestinian Space Agency), Lauren Higgins (MetaCurrency, ImpactHub), Deborah Hustić (Radiona), Juha Huuskonen (Open Knowledge Foundation, Pixelache), Raed Ibrahim, Sonal Jain & Mriganka Madhukaillya (Desire Machine Collective), Laurence McKeown, Dejan Kršić, Ivica Mitrović, Ivan Novak (NSK), Pepe Nummi (Grape People), Dinko Peračić & Miranda Veljačić (Platforma), Gordana Ristic, Christopher Robbins (Ghana Think Tank), Mabel Tapia, Richard Thomas (Resonance FM), Emina Višnić, Stephen Wright and Georg Zoche (Transnational Republic)
*
Supported with a travel grant from Iaspis
