Is There Anybody Out There?

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"Non-equilibrium is the origin of all coherence"

(Just an illusion ?, Ilya Prigogine)

In the 1960s, Professor Herman Kahn was studying the future; His training was in physics, in addition to having a solid background in history, sociology and mathematics, and he was a consultant to the US government on more than one occasion. Consulted in an interview about the Earth's natural resources, he replied that by 2020 they would be exhausted. Being a student of the future must entail a high rate of error, in addition to demanding an enormous imagination. 2020 is a year that sounds precisely like science fiction, one of those emblematic years that revive prophecies about cataclysms, world wars and inventions that never came, such as the flying house that Arthur C. Clarke - screenwriter of Odyssey 2001 - envisioned at this time, and that it could be installed at will in different territories and landscapes without even leaving it. What neither Clarke nor Professor Kahn imagined is that we would get to share space and time with people thousands of miles away with technological tools, and that these tools would question even the very notion of the body, merging the physical dimension with the virtual one in a continuum increasingly difficult to separate or distinguish, as experiences become more complex and immersive. This invisible modeling of new geographies from digital media, capable of connecting distant points and bringing two or more strangers into contact with each other - each from their city and their private public spaces - is one of the most innovative spatial contracts that we will witness.