Visualisations of Utopia (Part One)

I have recently trawled through the web for images of Utopia and discovered a wide and bewildering variety of ways in which Utopia is used for artistic, commercial, religious and political purposes. Below are the first of a series of images that caught my eye, in no particular order. Hope you like them!

Woodcut by Ambrosius Holbein for a 1519 edition of Thomas More’s Utopia. The lower left-hand corner shows the traveller Raphael Hythlodaeus, describing the island. More’s Utopia famously derives from the Greek words for ‘no place’ (outopia) and ‘good place’ (eutopia). Drawing on Erasmus, Plato and Lucian, More describes an island in the New World, linking Raphael’s travels and Amerigo Vespucci’s accounts of discovery in Four Voyages (1507).

"Man From Utopia." Magazine cover, 1972. Underground comic by Rick Griffin, American artist famous for his psychadelic posters in the 1960s. He was involved in the underground comix movement, inspired by the surfing subculture of southern California and psychadelic rock posters of Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelly. Griffin designed concert posters for the Human Be-In and The Charlatans. He was killed in a motorcycling accident in 1991.

A turn-of-the-century postcard of flying machines above a mega-metropolis (Duke University, Special Collections Library). As well as futuristic images that have fascinated artists, flying-machines also have a currency as vehicles of Utopian realisation through production, as exemplified in the Freedom commune, founded in Kansas in 1897. During the early part of the twentieth century, the Utopian colony achieved notoriety not for its Utopian lifestyle but, rather, for its flying factory. The reformer, Carl Browne, had designed the principle of rotary winged wheels to develop a commercial flying machine that would provide employment for Freedom’s denizens and ultimately supersede the bicycle!

(source: H. Roger Grant’s ‘Portrait of a Workers’ Utopia: The labour Exchange and the Freedom Kan., Colony’)

"The only way we'll make things work is if I lie to you and you lie to me." Poster designed by Olafur Eliasson and Israel Rosenfield from the Utopia Station project at the Venice Biennale in 2003. A station in Venice, designed by Tiravanija and Liam Gillick, hosted a series of programmes and performances themed around reimaginings of Utopia. Over 160 artists were commissioned to design posters that were exhibited around the city.

If anyone has any images they would like to blog, or more information on the images used here, please get in touch, we'd love to hear from you.