We live ourselves into the future that we seek.

     
 Facing the social problems in English society Thomas More published "Utopia" in 1516. He coined the term and imagined an ideal society for all human beings. To this day, with motivations rooted far on the religious right or way out there on the left- people have departed urban settings for secluded areas to live as part of intentional communities on their own terms. For many years the photographer Joel Sternfeld researched utopian communities in the United States or what is left of them. Walking into the central room of Sternfeld's exhibition in New York City's Chelsea we first see a quirky, vaguely Russian looking building: "Dacha/Staff Building Gesundheit! Institute," Hillsboro, Virginia (see detail below). In 1971 the founder Dr. Patrick Adams and 19 others with their children moved into this forty-bed rural community and declared it "the free silly hospital." The social experiment ended in 1983. The Springtree community near Scottsville, Virginia is still vibrant today. One Springtree group member states: "This is the place. These are my people." A group member of the Alpha Farm in Oregon says: "We live ourselves into the future we seek."

The exhibition presents also M.K. Reynolds' Earthship ("independent vessels to sail on to the sea of tomorrow"), and May Pole Mountain Sanctuary, Tennessee-- a non-hierarchical, safe place for "the queer identified." In Davis, California, Sternfeld found North Street Cohousing. Here, in 1986 one family removed the fence around their property, which was put up in the 1950s. 17 other homes followed suit, creating large open spaces for play. The Oneida Community in Oneida, New York believed in free communist love but argued it on Christian grounds abolishing marriage  as "egotism of two." Cabinet magazine addressed small utopian failed states in a recent issue.

Much of this utopian, anti-authoritarian and self-institutional drive lived on in cyber cities that emerged in the early 1990s such De Digitale Stad Amsterdam (documentation), Refugee Republic, or virtual worlds like Alphaworld. With De Digitale Stad one goal was to (re)claim the public sphere of the internet-- to create a free space that serves the interests of those inhabiting it. What I did not come across yet is a hybrid utopian space that brings together the amazing group building opportunities of the internet with the 'social bandwidth' of physically living together.