This article was translated by Google and R.E.
Kevin Kelly has just come out with an unusually large 3-volume photo book, Vanishing Asia, which weighs in excess of 12 kilos and holds over 9000 images with captions. Most people still know him not so much as a photographer, but rather as a writer and editor of pioneering publications such as the eco-tech bible of the hippie era The Whole Earth Catalogue (1968) as well Co-Evolution Quarterly og wire magazine, which he founded at the beginning of the digital revolution. In the books of Kevin Kelly, as What Technology Wants (2011) and The Inevitable (2016), he also writes a lot about Asia and compares different technological cultures. But how has travel and the interest in technology been connected in his own life?
«The very basic idea in The Whole Earth Catalogue was that you could invent and shape your own life, and this also became an inspiration for my travels – a kind of education. The lively street life, the outdoor workshops, the human life in all its kaleidoscopic abundance, as I experienced it in Asia, also became a bit like a catalog of possibilities: alternative ways of doing everyday things, such as dressing, building a house, performing a little ritual or cooking, ”replies Kevin Kelly.
He started traveling in Asia 50 years ago – a 20-year-old suburban American who had never used chopsticks. It was like landing on another planet – or stepping into a time machine! At that time, people lived well into the Middle Ages, in ways that had not changed at all in several centuries: “During these same 50 years, the whole continent decided to take the leap into the future, and in the time I have traveled there, they have created the world's most advanced and futuristic cities. "
That which disappears
We have been used to looking west, towards America. . .
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