CHICAGO – The (Un) Real

The contemporary no longer has any limits: for a while now it has been growing outside the walls and extending beyond the material. It is made of houses, streets, places, yet through the dimension of exchange of virtual, advertising messages it goes beyond its own boundaries, it becomes the scenario of the immaterial. A proper understanding of urban phenomena may not be separated from an anthropological analysis of a society which is becoming ever more complex and articulated.

Ecology is an active and dynamic phenomenon of the new urban condition. Communication among individuals is the new scenario which has to be confronted, the excess of urban, technological and industrial civilisation could develop antibodies apt at creating a planetary conscience based on the revolution of collective and individual sensitivity. In the meantime individuals mix, foreboding new races and social remodelling. The differences in society are still key elements in the definition of ways and styles of life, conflicts and contradictions. The metropolis has become global, it implodes and explodes fragments of human and urban landscape and the immaterial dimension of the image upsets its historical and temporal profile: the city as we live in it and perceive it is a map which no satellite is able to visualize. Cyberspaces which are continuously interwoven with the experience of the living. The City is the theatre of action and interaction and in the visible and invisible city, real and unreal, cosmopolitan life grows to the rythmn of cultural diversity along parrallel lines which can only meet to the rhythm of creativity, of aesthetics, of respect for the environment and for life. The evolution of the human being may not be separated from this ethical and aesthetical dimension, beyond all models functional to the system, beyond the logics of control of the masses, and of depersonalisation of the individual.

Stefania Carrozzini