1FUTURE at Osaka World Expo
The Osaka World Expo, the enormous world fair built on a harbor island in Osaka, Japan, had a theme of sustainability. Nations and large organizations like the United Nations built pavilions, which represented their interpretation/philosophy of sustainability. Each pavilion had its regional style, generally designed by a national architect. It was pretty fantastic, and very crowded. This may sound cynical, but it was like the Olympics of virtue signaling, with each pavilion showing off what that nation or region was doing to protect our futures (what I take “sustainability” to mean). It is important for us to understand what all of the people of the world consider to be sustainability. I think the only way we will make a sustainable future is by empowering individuals to come to their own solutions, and that means more than separating our plastics for recycling. One really important way for us to sustain our one future is to consider the plight of nuclear disarmament. Once a front page issue, there are currently no official plans for international discussions, nor solid ideas how to convene: the United States (Still the only nuclear power to use an A-bomb in anger); Russia; and China, which is steadily compiling a Cold War era number of bombs. There was a certain stability with 2 main nuclear powers, a balance, that held (with extreme luck on several occasions) for 50 years during the Cold War. Everyone has heard of the inherent instability of the three body problem. This is the world we live in today. We must do everything in our power to reduce, and eventually remove this threat.
UNODA x 1FUTURE designed and curated by Mari Ishiko:
Early morning discussion: Respect and Human rights
The dome set up was technical, and during the afternoon talk, I was running the show, so I did not take any pictures!
Nagasaki video on the Shining Hat
The video was displayed with this text, in english and Japanese:
This video, an excerpt from Trinity, Birth of the Anthropocene, shows the view, as if by plane, of Nagasaki – the second city bombed by a nuclear weapon in 1945. After cloud cover made it impossible to hit their original targets, American bombers ultimately dropped the bomb on Japan’s largest Christian church. The immersive video installation, comprising time-lapse videos from the Trinity site in the United States, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki asks us to commemorate these places, view these spaces, and consider how we may invoke our agency to shape how technology affects us all
Here are more pictures!
After hanging the show, we took a roundabout tour of the Expo, to the West Gate and then all the way back to the East Gate (the famous wood frame structure, which the expo spilled out from on either side, was a circle with a diameter of at least 1km) to find our way out, and much needed rest.
It was really amazing to wander about the Expo, after hours.