AI Science Café Series 2020: Mobility - is autonomous driving an answer to reducing traffic congestion in our cities? With Michal Čáp
Cities are overly congested with traffic and pollution. At present the most widely discussed solution is urban on-demand mobility based self-driving technology. The envisioned automated mobility-on-demand (AMoD) systems employ a centrally-controlled fleet of self-driving vehicles to provide on-demand point-to-point transportation to the users of the system. Such systems promise to revolutionise user behaviour and significantly improve the efficiency of urban transportation. As a case study, we will discuss and quantify the potential for car-sharing and ride-sharing to reduce the number of vehicles in the city of Prague, its application to other cities around the world and the implications for policy making.
Tango Salon – La Confiteria Ideal + Q&A with Jana Bokova and Leslie Megahey
The great city of Buenos Aires is still reeling from the economic crisis, but - paradoxically - out of the daily suffering of the porteños one of the strongest tango revivals ever has risen. On the one hand, Jana Bokova`s Tango Salon - La Confiteria Ideal can be seen as a Buenos Aires-set Buena Vista Social Club, full of great music and dance played out against the backdrop of the legendary Confiteria Ideal, one of the oldest of Buenos Aires` tango halls. On the other it is easy to see the tango as a defiant political act, a refusal to lie down and die in the face of the country`s continued poverty. Bokova celebrates the lives of the tangueros and tangueras - old milongueros, local dancers, tango teachers, foreigners and tango stars aged from 20 to 80 - all of whom share their tango stories of love, family, nationality etc., and shows how the political and the aesthetic are inextricably interwoven.
A Czech Dreambook: Dissent as an Everyday Experience
*** PANEL DISCUSSION & BOOK LAUNCH *** It’s 1979 in Communist Czechoslovakia and the banned writer Ludvík Vaculík – whose anti-regime manifesto was used by the Soviet Union as a pretext for invading Czechoslovakia – has writer’s block. He begins to keep a diary ‘about things, people and events.’ The result is a unique mixture of diary, dream journal and outright fiction, in which the author, his family, his mistresses, and leading characters of the Czech underground, such as Václav Havel, Jaroslav Seifert, Ivan Klíma, Pavel Kohout, Jiří Kolář, and Daňa Horáková (all using their real names) play major roles, bringing their dilemmas and decisions to life for contemporary readers. Appearing in English translation for the first time, forty years after Vaculík finished the book, this genre-defying and utterly compelling masterpiece serves as an account of life under constant surveillance – something highly relevant today.
Valerie and her Week of Wonders + introduction by Kim Newman
Czech Centre London in partnership with Second Run presents a special screening of Jaromil Jireš' enduring classic of fantasy cinema, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Presented from a new HD transfer of original materials prepared by the Czech National Film Archive, the screening celebrates the release of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders on Blu-ray by Second Run.
Metaphors of Nature: Galerie Kuzebauch at Collect 2020
During its second visit to Collect 2020 in London, Galerie Kuzebauch will showcase exceptional pieces of Czech studio glass created mainly by a generation of artists born after the 1970s who draw inspiration from nature. The exhibition highlights a creative trend in glassmaking inspired by and stemming from the natural world, primarily landscape and geology. The forces of nature are a source of inspiration – the captured movements of waves and winds and the stillness of a frozen landscape in winter. The aesthetic world of glass making reflects geological transformations and natural forces which remain forever imprinted in the cooled surface of each individual piece.
