NOW’S YOUR CHANCE! Check out this unique exhibition for the first time or visit again to hear the talented Alex Costantino speak about the work, material, process, and concept behind ‘Avalon’, August 3rd at 7pm.

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In the better half of the 21st century, in the middle of a glacier-carved lake in the hilly north edge of a certain green, mountainous state, there is an island village called Avalon. It exists after scarcity, with a peculiar continuity to its past as a lumber milling center and a summertime retreat for farther-flung wealth. Avalon is a portrait of a particular rural future, one in which the questions of life in the outer edges of a wealthy, deeply unequal society have been answered in unexpected ways.

 

The world of Avalon is partially one of technological post scarcity, with much of the challenge of keeping everyone housed and clothed solved by careful and efficient extraction of the means of keeping all people housed, clothed, and fed using technologies most analogous to contemporary rapid prototyping, made democratically cheap and ubiquitous, but also changes in society, locally and throughout this global future, of more free and more equal distribution not only of the technology at issue, but the knowledge and means to use it. It hasn’t meant that there are no clerks, or farmers, or teachers on Avalon, but that none of them really want for anything.

The project of Avalon comes from a desire to see a future for the world we live in, one not mired in dystopias that warn us against our worst possible todays without pointing toward the better world that is indeed possible. It’s particularly pressed on by a desire to see a future that isn’t characterized by the bleeding edge of the technologically and culturally possible we see in most speculative fiction, one centered on the great cosmopolitan global cities or interplanetary frontiers, but one that can be envisioned in the small, aging towns, the remote and currently-shrinking places that have and likely will be receiving the future’s distribution second and third-hand.