#drupa2050 — TX to Benny: Touch the future again and again…

By Andreas Weber | German version

 

“Made it!” The glorious centenary celebration at #drupa2050 was over. The only representative, speaker, exhibitor, mediator and visitor on site was Benny Landa. Just before drupa 2020, Benny had fallen into a nano-ink container in an attempt to get a look at the all-new colour, Benny Orange, which surpassed all Pantone colours. Ever since, he radiated like the Dalai Lama and endowed the print industry with a transcendental touch. After the initial shock, Benny was sure that nothing more on Earth could be achieved.

And that wasn’t all. He had become immortal. Ever since 2020, he had always opened the drupe on 1 April. On 1 April 2050 — in other words, one hundred years after the foundation of drupa — he now stood on the nanographic-holography-7D exhibition grounds, which had passed into the ownership of the Jeff Bezos Foundation many decades before. In a clever move, Bezos had taken control of the world economy by buying majority shares in all specialised lawyers’ practices around the world. He was then able to use the TTIP agreement in order to destroy all of his competitors quite legally by way of prosecution, and filled his own coffers.

Jeff (still hale and hearty and well over 80, but now only active as a silent partner and co-boss) and Benny (the Immortal) get along great, since they both replaced the “Only-One-Man-Can-Lead” management principle with a Double Consul Agreement, similar to the tradition of the Ancient Roman Republic. The two liked to joke that each top position has a good side and an even better side. After months of visionary and tinkering work, Jeff and Benny managed to reproduce the Old Town of the Gutenberg city of Mainz using 7D printing — true to the original in the year 1460 — and to position it within seconds before the astonished eyes of the specialist audience on 1 April 2050 at 11.11 a.m. in Düsseldorf, thus pepping up the exhibition hall panorama, which had grown boring.

It was a real coup. As in 1951 in Hall 1 at Heidelberg, there was only one machine that just about fit into the 7D replica of Mainz Cathedral; a visionary-ravishing prototype according to the nano-end-to-end-solution principle was celebrated: In real time, the “BennyFire 007” was able to think up, produce, distribute, consume and integrate printed material in an environmentally friendly manner into the patented J&B-Cradle-to-Cradle-Recycling cycle … — All of the annoying problems with data quality, colour management, precision fit, logistics and postal costs and the constant trouble with the recipients/readers of the printed matter were overcome. — Benny felt good in Düsseldorf. — “Wherever you are happy, that’s your home.”

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I WAKE UP, DRENCHED IN SWEAT. It is Saturday, 11 June 2016, 6.30 a.m. and #drupa2016 is over. And I obviously took the exhibition motto “Touch the Future” much too literally. — I pack, have breakfast and travel back home calmly, to the Gutenberg city of Mainz.