It is the year 2050. It is a time when humanism has been overthrown by the abuse of technology resulting in the alienation of human beings by advanced capitalism.
According to a survey by Martin College of Oxford University, 47% of jobs will be replaced by automation and manual labor by 2037. Marx believed that in the capitalist application of the machine system, ‘as long as workers' activities are not required by (capital) needs, workers will become redundant’. The decline of the distribution proportion of workers and the reduction of job opportunities may lead to the inequality of income distribution and the polarisation of social strata, especially the absolute poverty of the proletariat.
In recent years, the integration of the Internet, AI, big data, blockchain, and brain-computer interface technology has triggered a revolution in human intelligence and with it class differences have proliferated. At the same time, marginalized groups use this technology to construct their own worlds, that is, to reconstruct collective imagination, autonomy, identity, and desire in the virtual world. When the boundary of dualism is broken (the three most critical boundaries of dualism - man and animal, creature and machine, material and immaterial), the traditional architectural space will also be changed, which is a story of building identity, scope, relationship, and space.
These marginalized groups who were ‘deprived of the discourse of power’ have fled society, retreating to the country estate at Charleston House to redefine their collective needs. They come to realize a new sense of truth, identity, and belonging that mainstream culture and society cannot provide. The absolute inequality of class will help to unite people in the same framework (common ideals and values), and will also give it cultural significance, the birth of a new subculture.
Charleston House in 2050 is a reflection on the abuse of technology and the instrumentalization of capital to human beings and a practice of returning to the pursuit of intrinsic value. It seeks to question how space could become the infrastructure of the virtual world? It will be shown as collective and public creativity (reality and virtual), as well as a process of feeling and experience strengthening (continuous construction and continuous interpretation).
