The Car of the Future? 'Route 66 in the Year 2100' by Nick Pugh, courtesy Alan N. Shapiro

Thanks to PHUTURAMA contributor Holger Logemann, who obviously is watching his Korvettenprojekt logfiles in a quite meticulous manner, I had the chance to get notice of a PHUTURAMA-related post by author Felix Knoke who is blogging from Berlin for FM4 Radio – a channel of Austria’s national public service broadcaster ORF – taglined “Confusions from Boredom to Nerd stuff” (Verwirrungen zwischen Langeweile und Nerdstuff). [1]

His Day-1 transmediale.10 entry is heavily focusing on our PHUTURAMA Sub-Conference at the Salon Talks last week. For his text is written in German I would like to bring up a short summary of Felix Knoke’s inspiringly critical post. Amongst the entire line-up of the PHUTURAMA session whose participants weren’t praised by him in total at all, he identifies two “complete madmen” deserving a closer view: Holger Logemann for its Korvettenprojekt 3435 A. D. [2] and Alan N. Shapiro for his studies on “The Car of the Future.” [3] Nonetheless, in my opinion Felix Knoke doesn’t exactly hit the mark, when he describes Holger Logemann’s Korvettenprojekt as “megalomaniac.” For, in relation to the usual proportions of the PERRY RHODAN universe – aka the “Perryversum” – it is a really shy and modest attempt to set just some techno-visual standards for this series. On the other hand, his assessment on Alan N. Shapiro’s presentation isn’t entirely out of this world, because this author, software developer and entrepreneur is definitely and unmistakeably on a mission. The car design renderings which Alan presented and Felix then was googling for in vain weren’t from the 1970s. These stunningly crafted art works are derived by the gifted hands of designer Nick Pugh [4], exclusively commisioned by Alan N. Shapiro himself.

Probably, in his report on PHUTURAMA, one point Felix isn’t quite aware of, the event wasn’t intended to just theoretically or even metaphorically pay into the transmediale’s superior FUTURITY NOW! subject, but to bring designers and practitioners from different industries to a single table to jointly share their experiences from either different angles with the particular matter of speculative, fictitious and futuristic art and design. During the session I had the faint notion this could have had happened in one or another moment at PHUTURAMA.

[1] “Transmediale Tag 1: Illusionen und Verstand” by Felix Knoke at fm4.orf.at
[2] Holger Logemann’s Korvettenprojekt 3435 A. D.
[3] “The Car of the Future” by Alan N. Shapiro & Alan Cholodenko
[4] Nick Pugh Studio Website