Fab Lab Barcelona at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC). On the screen, artist and designer Olafur Eliasson gives a lecture to the fab lab network within the Academy’s program.
For some years now, we have been witnessing the emergence of relational, cross-over, participative power. This is the territory that gives technopolitics its meaning and prominence, the basis on which a new vision of democracy – more open, more direct, more interactive - is being developed and embraced. It is a framework that overcomes the closed architecture on which the praxis of governance (closed, hierarchical, one-way) have been cemented in almost all areas. The series The ecosystem of open democracy explores the different aspects of this ongoing transformation.
Hundreds of years ago, human agriculture made excess production possible, and this led to the accumulation of goods, the concentration of people in towns, and the end of the role of the hunter-gatherer. A few hundred years later, we came up with a system to organise the exchange of services and products at an abstract level: money. Today’s economy is based on the flow of real and fictitious money, which simplifies the value of assets, skills, people, resources, and almost every element of reality. Money has become a means and an end in itself.
