MACHAS

Love and spirituality in the high-tech age. 

Back when I was a kid talking about the year 2000 would conjure images of high-tech improvements in our everyday life: Blade Runner style video interfaces, space-age transportation a-la Epcot Center’s monorail and endless promises of a better, easier life that was not here just yet - but not very far away either. If you are wondering, yes, I was born in the (late) Seventies. However, the future used to be perceived as something that still had to happen, and to most it would have become a reality once the calendar reached the 2000 year mark.. 

Then year 2k arrived and nothing changed overnight; even the apocalyptic computer meltdown that was hyped on every media outlet across the planet deflated like a poorly made soufflé. Truth is the real change already started to happen before the 2K milestone, more specifically when the internet became widely used by the populations of the First World.

Now technologies are shaping our lives without too much fanfare but to an extent that is influencing even our most intuitive gestures - I’m sure that I wasn’t the only one who tried to use my fingers to scroll down the screen of an old Blackberry model….

So in 2013 what is the future looking like? With this in mind the good people at Usbek & Rica created a quite beautiful and interesting monographic book called “2043” in occasion of Altavia’s 30th anniversary - and they have called Becha to give shape to what the future may hold for spirituality and the human race in 2043 .

“What I liked the most in the brief is that vision where the mind is going to be dominant, not some machine, some intelligent software or robots”, says Becha. “It’s all about understanding, love, connecting minds and spirituality. Although I am not very optimistic about the whole future thing, the point of view of the imagery is really encouraging. I would love to live in this future.”

Becha’s illustrations are far from the cold mood that we used to envisage when thinking about the future: it’s almost like sitting into Timothy Leary’s mind in the middle of one of his lovey-dovey journeys to new realms of consciousness and then being teleported straight to 2043.

You can get you copy of Uskeb & Rica’ s 2043 Issue here