Ivrea
Sunflower, Ivrea, 2011.
I am a technology obsessive.
It has something to do with being an only girl born to a culture biased towards boys. My dad is an engineer and as a child I used to watch him solder circuit boards in our study. On afternoons when I finished school, I would spend time on his office computer, reading Usenet flamewars about sci-fi movies and fantasy novels I hadn’t read.
Garden, Ivrea, 2011.
It might have something to do with being an only child and having Dr Who and Star Trek keep me company while my parents were out working. The other day I was watching Galaxy Quest, a movie about the cast of a campy 60s sci-fi show where aliens have mistaken the TV show for historical documentation and hail the actors as their heroes. In one scene, a dying alien professes to Alan Rickman’s hack actor character that watching him had irrevocably changed his life and that he considered Rickman as the father he never had.
That scene almost made me cry.
Because I know exactly what he means. I know because three years ago, at Comic-con, I met Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation and I shook his hand and said the only thing I could think to say, which is that Star Trek irrevocably changed the way I live my life. That Star Trek made me a better person. And I saw in his eyes that he heard that a lot, but it still managed to freak him out.
But that’s neither here nor there.
Swing set, Ivrea, 2011.
I arrived in Ivrea, in June of 2004, because I was a technology obsessive and I wanted to push its limits.
“We want you to be sure you want to come.” The admissions interviewer had said on the phone.
Ivrea was to be a two-year Masters program on interaction design, in an Italian town of 24,000 people, most of whom did not speak English. The school’s population consisted of 40 students and a handful of professors. The campus and student residence were both commissioned, in the 1970s, by Olivetti for its creative workers. In this lush, alien town, we lived and breathed technology, believing that hidden in our hillside residence, amongst the trees and grass, we were inventing the future.
Garden, Ivrea, 2011.
My fellow students and I lived here in what was to be Ivrea’s final year as an institute. We finished our second year in Milan and closed the institute forever.
In returning we found that not much had changed in Ivrea. The town went on without us, gardens grew, people moved into the spaces we had occupied. We had collectively willed an energy, a culture into existence and it had dissipated with us.
It’s true what Gibson says, that the future is here, just unevenly distributed. You have to look for the soft spots, wherever they may form.
The Lake, Ivrea, 2011.
Tristam, Ivrea, 2011.