THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

Noteh Krauss, an explorer and thinker interested in the metaphysical fabrics that create our life experience, brings his acclaimed 2018 PRIMER EU (Helsinki) presentation to San Francisco. This talk will focus deeply on the ultra-contemporary architecture of Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan, and how the architecture acted as a powerful force of cultural change in Kazakhstan.

In 1997, President Nursultan Nazarbayev embarked on one of the most ambitious speculative design projects ever realized. With the fall of the USSR, Nazarbayev had the dream to create a new Kazakh economy, society, and culture. Impressively massive goals, but how to accomplish them? Nazarbayev’s solution was to use speculative design and design fiction to create a new highly-futuristic capital: Astana. Astana was built using highly futuristic architectures to create spaces that citizens could actively walk through and thus understand and themselves realize Nazarbayev’s vision of the country. And through this process, further increase the trust of the populace in his leadership. This talk will examine the histories, politics, design fictions, and mythologies President Nazarbayev’s Astana embodies as perhaps the most ambitious speculative design project ever implemented.

Noteh graduated from McGill University in Political Science (First Class Honours) and in Graphic Design from Parsons School of Design. Through both degrees, Noteh studied the modes in which design becomes propagated into – and conditions – our lived experience on a personal and societal basis. Noteh founded Aesthetic Dimension, a strategic design firm based in San Francisco and Toronto. He has lectured at the YBCA, California College of the Arts, and internationally.