☆ Chapter 9 - Utopia ☆
“Using our imagination to establish goals that inspire people, provide direction, and stimulate creativity, helping others to envision different ways of seeing and feeling. It is about finding utopia.”
As an artist and designer, I am very much into this concept. When I create something out of nothing, I am not just focused on the look of it, but also how it will make people feel and what message it is putting out there. That quote also brings up for me that art has the power to get people to think in different terms and at times to even question what they think is real. It also pushes me to see my creative work as a bigger issue something that has the ability to change how people view the world and what they think is possible. In that sense “finding utopia” is not about reaching a perfect place, but rather the start of the journey which is to imagine that place and use that image to bring about real change.
“He takes us there — lets us see it and feel it — but then reminds us that this place is just imaginary. He doesn’t want us to simply swap our world for his alternative, so he makes his alternative impossible for us to inhabit. But it’s too late for us to go home; we’ve already been exposed to the idea of an alternative. We’ve been to Utopia, and once we can imagine someplace else, then we know that the world we live in today is not the only possibility. We can imagine another world.”
This quote hit me the most as it puts into words what I experience which is that ideas do in fact transform us. May not be a physical place we can go to but just the concept of it does change how we live our lives and see the world. I do the same thing, when I am exposed to other points of view through art, through stories, through living them, I can’t unsee them. They make me reevaluate things I may have just accepted all my life. We do not require a perfect world to exist in, we can be inspired by it. Here the point of utopia is not to escape reality but to question it. It brings out a moment of realization that the world we live in is not set in stone or unchangeable. That realization in itself is the start of action. For me, this also plays into activism and into storytelling. When people see or present an alternate reality that breaks from what is known and sets off something in them, they want to improve things even in small ways.
As someone that has an interest in art and communication, I put a great deal of value in this. What it does is present concepts which stick with the audience. While change may not happen right away, it changes the perspective. We may not see the results immediately but that shift is in itself a large step. Once we are able to picture a different reality we begin to see that change is possible and from there everything else follows.
FINAL IDEA
This chapter gave me an idea that makes me want to continue working with the topic “Global Warming” and I would like to start this by creating a place that you would call it as a “Perfect World.” Somewhere you have everything you desired, a world where would have everything you had wished for, your own world where everything is perfect, beautiful, and peaceful, where you don’t have to worry about anything because you would have it all. Since everything is yours, you would care a lot for it, you would die for this world of yours, you wouldn’t let anything to happen to it. With this idea, the message I would like to transmit is that you have to care about Earth as your own world, your home, your favorite place, somewhere that gives you everything, maybe not as easy as we think but we have to look for it. Your world is dying and you have to start changing what you’re doing day by day, starting to make some small changes, there are not as insignificant as you think. When people start doing it all together, it’s when you would start seeing the difference.
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