MindStyleMagazine

Choc
&
Chaos

Intro

Future Concept Lab

Evoking a future scenario that is chaotic and punctuated by phenomena that express an almost schizophrenic lack of continuity and shock in this phase of the transition appears to be all too easy. Instead of doing that, we feel it is really important to underscore the human and philosophical scope of this landscape, redeeming and building upon those elements of vitality and creativity produced by the shock and the chaos, when the latter are experienced and managed in the right way. The awareness of the point of rupture and its unpredictable nature, as well as the contemporary relevance of evil and perversion, constitute potent antibodies for the systems of life and thought that want to deal with the vital dynamics of the new millennium.
1. The collapse of linear and progressive models, the anxiety associated with the possible critical points deriving from the growing complexity of the technological applications in human activities.
2. The exorcism of the negative events in the conviction that any problem contains the germ of its own solution.
3. The way reality is not reducible to a simplified model and a chaotic rationale as the new form of creative stimulation.
4. Complexity as a factor of development in unstable societies subjected to increasingly accelerating changes.
5. The labyrinth and chaotic systems as models for understanding and interpreting reality. The necessity of developing strategies for managing complexity.
6. Maps and strategies as tools of survival for dealing with the weakening of classic logic and approaches to reasoning.
7. The tendency to shift attention away from the micro to the macro, from specialization to holistic thinking, including an examination of the interaction between biology and vital experience.
8. Luxury makes it possible to indulge in a sophisticated infraction of the social rules, a sort of refusal to accept the temporary quality of the carnival spirit of license and excess.
9. The awareness of a new threshold of the Eros frontier as an opportunity for self expression and the affirmation of a greater tolerance in the areas of ethics and sexuality that is pushing behaviors that were previously prohibited toward more extreme limits.
10. The aesthetic of death and pathology as a reaction to a social paradigm that in the quest for well-being attempts to suppress the ritual ceremony and paraphernalia surrounding death and evil and the control of anxiety that is thus achieved.

» from MindStyles Program 2002, by Future Concept Lab