Zvuky Prahy / Sounds of Prague

Sound essay inspired by the DOX current exhibtion "The Brave New World". The project conceived probably by the DOX director and owner Leoš Válka is based on the idea that searches genealogy of the social models by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Ray Bradbury described in their famous dystopic visions of the future. The exhibition works suppose to point to relationships with the current social situation, especially the area of social control, consumerism, and the media.

Twenty-seven years later, in this third quarter of the twentieth century A.D., and long before the end of the first century A.F., I feel a good deal less optimistic than I did when I was writing Brave New World. The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would. The blessed interval between too little order and the nightmare of too much has not begun and shows no sign of beginning. In the West, it is true, individual men and women still enjoy a large measure of freedom. But even in those coun­tries that have a tradition of democratic government, this freedom and even the desire for this freedom seem to be on the wane. In the rest of the world freedom for individuals has already gone, or is manifestly about to go. The nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner

A.Huxley: Brave new world revisited 1958