Utopia Toolbox (with Juliane Stiegele)

Utopia Toolbox, US edition co-assembled with Juliane Stiegee, published by Toolbox Books, Munich, distributed by University of Michigan Press

Utopia Toolbox is a publication that incorporates action. This is an art & design manual less about the design of a chair or a table, and more about the social space between those sitting at the table. Think of a hybrid between something like a how-to—whether a cookbook or home repair, and a theoretical framework that asks artists, designers, planners, architects and cultural producers to consider their actions in context. The publication contains an anthology of texts, quotations, interviews, documentation of art and design projects and do-it-yourself actions and performances.

The broad seeking goal of Utopia Toolbox is to entice creative practitioners across the globe to evolve constructive definitions of utopia through an interdisciplinary approach. The structure of the book adapts to the mess inside real toolboxes. Its open composition animates to leave the worn-out, grassless paths of thinking in favor of new and unknown combinations. The volumes also contain a sufficient number of empty pages to sketch ones own ideas and thinking processes while reading. By using the book as an open ended invitation to interrogate its contents, Utopia Toolbox is looking to be dog eared, to be stood or sat upon, to be rebuilt.

With contributions in practice and in text represented from a broad array of disciplinary rubrics (philosophy, art, science, technology, economics, spirituality) and from across the stages of life (from a 8 year-old children to octogenarian physicist Hans-Peter Duerr. The contributions (in content and in proximity to one another) offer unexpected and fresh impulses, directions, estimations, suggestions and approaches and serve as a catalyst for creativity.

Among the authors, artists and interview partners of Volume 1 are: Atelier fuer Sonderaufgaben, Irina Aristakhova, Frithjof Bergmann, Roland Graf, Jeffreen Hayes, Maximillian Goldfarb, Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Beuys, Goetz W. Werner, John Cage, Kristy Cha Ray Chu, Hans-Peter Duerr, Marcel Geisser, Gert Heidenreich, Lisanne Hoogerwerf, Peter Heintel, Edgar Honetschläger, Toby Huddlestone, Maria Lai, Lissa Lobis, Geert Lovink, John Maynard Keynes, Patrick Mimran, Lord Mountbatten, Asta Nykaenen, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Rainer Rappmann, Charlie Richardson, Lisa und Niklas Carstens, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ta-Lih Shieh, Rudolf Steiner, Juliane Stiegele, Johannes Stuettgen, The Catastrophe Institute, Transnationale Republiken, Verity & Shu Huai, Marianne Williamson, Gustav Mesmer, Max Zurbuchen.

By definition, and from its roots, utopia is from the Greek word, composed of ou, not, and topos, a place. Etymologically, Utopia is uncomfortable, a place which does not exist, a fantasy, invention or fairy-tale. It is a neither here nor there slippery space, one that is a perfect creative opportunity, as the form and definition is both to open to interpretation and impossible to arrive at. Utopia Toolbox–its contents and its contributors—invite you to work with us through this opportunity.

It may be uncomfortable. But we will need this dynamic if we are elastic—in thought, in form, in ambition. If we are brave enough to create and design for the needs of the young, the old, the winter, the summer, and embrace planning and design for change and dynamism rather than perfection.