One of my favorite futurist artist Syd Mead talked about buildable futures. This caused a question to linger in my head for ever. What will the future look like and how will we of browness be involved. Yeah we buy a lot of pre-owned dwellings and do lots of apartments and condos and if fortune comes to us the "big House". I watch the programs about the tiny house movement and marvel at young white folk giving up the notion of a permanent foundation based house for one that is somewhat transportable. I laugh, some struggle to put everything in it and some like a camp trailer. It's a port-a-potty with a living onsuite.
Oh the serious talk of giving up amenities and paring down possessions, a kind of simple life with less ego and status display of materialism. But my question for us........what if we would do near the same. I say near because I'm not a fan of the gypsy life. But what If we look at some of the considerations of living with less like this. I don't mean living in a hut/shanty/shack like our ancestors, but even with the technology we have today it is still not far from that. Like living in an encampment on a distant planet. How would we build off-grid and still have what we need and do it with style and grace of course. I am not a fan of cargo containers in their raw state, junk yards (eclectic devastation art), apocalyptic futures. I have shown some of my ideas on this site and I think about the possibilities of a material culture that might come out of Afrofuturism besides body adornment, hero cosplay and sound art (love it). Like the tiny house adventurers would some of us make the plunge with the added twist of an Afrofuturist motif. Sort of a living experiment. It is a catalyst move for sure but move on the line of Space 1999 than the Bootsy Collins invasion. The point is living in the future today. Yes, I've got my vision of that future and you got yours. But how does this future materialize beyond todays mind-space? What if the tiny house were a bubble or the hull of a large plane, how would you live in it? the same?
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