How To Prosper During The Coming Bad Years

Filed under Events • 27-09-2009 •

For a small event organised in a short amount of time and with no budget, Bristolcon went amazingly well. The panels were interesting and the guest of honour talks fascinating. And it was great to meet up with so many friends and colleagues for a few beers and a bit of a chat.

Next on the agenda is the upcoming event How to Prosper during the Coming Bad Years to be held in a remarkable new pavillion, The Black Cloud, in Victoria Park, Bristol. The work and its accompanying programme of events has been commissioned by Situations at the University of the West of England, and emerges from a month-long residency as part of the RSA Arts and Ecology programme in Bristol in 2007.

From the blurb:

“The Black Cloud is a new temporary public sculpture designed as a shelter for the park in readiness for a hostile and inhospitable future, to screen people from an unforgiving environment and create a place that community can coalesce in difficult times. The Black Cloud is informed by vernacular architecture built to withstand extreme environmental conditions, with the Yakisugi treatment of the timbers creating a scorched protective shield, the irregular oval form closely referencing the shabono, and the triangular structuring and ethos of the building technique echoing Drop City. Its function as a communal focal point has been modelled upon The Range in Slab City, and the future landscape envisioned for the work is based on the bleak elemental extremes of J.G. Ballard’s catastrophe series.”

How to Prosper during the Coming Bad Years will be held on Saturday 10 October from 10.30 – 1pm. It is intended as a forum between people of diverse disciplines to explore the future through the differing mindsets of conservation versus preparedness; a theme that dominates the thinking behind The Black Cloud.

I will be attending as a key speaker to deliver a 10 to 15 minute talk about the use of science fiction as a means of debating and modelling the future, and to take questions.

Everyone is welcome at this event, and because of the passionate opinions it has stirred locally, it promises to be a very lively event.

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