Chapter 14. Personal belongings

While Colonizing Company and its appearances form the core of the installation, they are still surrounded by other objects and graphic props. Additional items make the setting and the narrative of the speculative future clearer, so there is no need to read this whole thesis in order to understand the artistic work. But most importantly, their purpose was to provoke the emotions of viewers.

All of the props are personal belongings of the room’s owner and are not connected to Colonizing Company directly, therefore they needed distinct graphic styles and also a special content based on their purpose.

Newspaper

Will be analog reading still a thing in 2050? Will people read newspapers? What will they be interested in? I asked myself the same things and tried to imagine the answer to these questions.

Cover of The Future Times newspaper

© Vasilisa Aristarkhova

The Future Times is a newspaper from San Francisco, the capital of Silicon Valley, and the city where the headquarters of Colonizing Company is located. Its name is a sarcastic reference to The New York Times, The Moscow Times, and any other …Times in the world. The newspaper is a typical tabloid with yellow titles masking itself under a serious broadsheet format. Maybe it was a broadsheet back when it was first issued, but people did not used to read that much anymore so it became a 4-pager filled with images and ads.

With the design of the newspaper I am trying to predict how people’s reading behavior might change in 30 years. But the content is important for the narrative too as it opens the window to the world we are looking at. On the first page we see a cover story dedicated to the British monarchy. Half of the page is filled just with gossip – another half is a quirky picture related to the article. From the text we learn one important rule of Colonizing Company: “no man under the age of 18 years is allowed to be transported to the Colony 1.” On one hand, it sounds realistic because children might not be able to survive the increase of g-forces during the lift-off. On the other hand, it is quite a pessimistic scenario considered the Earth may collapse any time soon.

The second page is given to a section called “Meme news.” It is exactly what you would think it is: news told within memes. Memes are a good tool for telling information. But what if it became the official way of telling the news? The Future Times proposes memes with titles as a way to tell the important information. From my point of view, the problematic of creating memes is that they are understandable only within a specific context. If someone did not watch Spiderman, it would be hard for him to understand jokes based on it. For this person the meme will be just some picture with description which does not make sense. As I have completely no chance to know which memes will exist in 2050 I had to imitate the process of their creation. I found a few random unpopular funny photos and added some random titles. The combination of the title and the picture does not mean anything, but human brain always tries to find connections. So everyone who sees these memes in 2020 will find his own reason to laugh at the future times.

On the third and the last page with information, readers can find two articles. The longer one tells a little bit more about future technologies. Scientists may be inventing something important in 2050, but what people want to read about are anime start-ups. No surprise that a depressing article about wildfires is the smallest and is printed on the corner of the newspaper.

Inside pages and the back cover of The Future Times

© Vasilisa Aristarkhova

On the back cover, Colonizing Company bought a product-placement. It is not the first ad the viewers will see in the installation. We notice mentions of this corporation here and there, native ads are in every text. It gives a viewer the feeling that in this speculated future everything is owned by Colonizing Company.

The Future Times as a part of Planet B

© Vasilisa Aristarkhova

Calendar and to-do list

Calendar layout

© Vasilisa Aristarkhova

“October 2050,” states the text set in an extra-bold typeface on top of the calendar sheet. Through this graphic prop, the viewer is immediately transported to the future.

This calendar is hanged onto a magnetic whiteboard. Similar boards are often used by people in the tech industry for making notes, brainstorming, and hanging papers. That was the reason to choose this item for the installation over the usual corkboard.

The calendar is issued by the California Institute of Technology as a souvenir for the class of Space Engineering ’50, where the character is enrolled. From this interior detail, a calendar on a whiteboard, a viewer can learn the schedule of the student as well as his nearest plans. The to-do list written by hand on the board reveals that he has a family, a girlfriend, a dog, and some friends on Earth. The same information could be found in his Red Card. Colonizing Company knows all the details of his personal life, which could be scary for people nowadays who are concerned about the safety of their data.

The calendar and the to-do list in the installation

© Vasilisa Aristarkhova

His plans for October are quite sad. The character has to leave all of his closest ones on Earth, and this month is the last chance to say goodbye to everyone. He plans to take his dog named Buddy to a shelter as no one can take care of him, throw a farewell party with his friends and family, and sign out of the university. The stakes are so high that even studying in Caltech is worth quitting if one is offered to move to Mars.

The farewell gathering point in this story is extremely important for me personally. Being an immigrant myself I had the experience of telling everyone that I am leaving: my grandparents, my parents, my friends. Some of them were happy for me, some of them were upset. For me saying goodbye was not hard at all, because it was just “see you next time” not “goodbye forever.” I am not sure if I would leave if I knew that I would never come back and never see these people again.

The to-do list and calendar are designed with the purpose of reminding viewers of homesickness. I think humanity has almost forgotten about this feeling. Nowadays technology helps us to smooth the experience of being far from the familiar, up to the point where the change even goes unnoticed.

But interplanetary immigrants will face a homesickness that is not possible in today’s world. The homesickness on an enormous multiplanetary scale.

Cider

Cider bottles as a part of the installation. Front label of the Lemon Tree cider. The QR code on the back label leads to the Planet B website.

© Vasilisa Aristarkhova

This melancholic feeling continues also in the other items presented in the installation – e.g. the cider package. From the amount of scattered empty bottles, viewers can tell that the room’s owner is definitely feeling down lately. Perhaps he drinks to make the sadness of the last days on Earth go away. Or maybe it is his favorite drink that will not be available on Mars at all.

The name of the product, “Lemon tree,” is a reference to a song with the same name by Fool’s Garden. The song was written in 1995 but has a typical 60s melody, which confirms my observation about nostalgia in culture, in music and in the movie industries. Retrospective sound lets a listener go back in time in his memories. It is a very nice feeling that people also seek when they are feeling homesick, a soothing sense of familiarity. But even without the song context, words like “lemon tree” remind me of home. My brain plays an association game with me: lemon tree – garden – grandma – childhood.

I used to spend summers at my grandma’s countryside house. Remembering it is something extremely simple yet so surprisingly calming.

The graphic style of the package also reminds about the 60s – the happy time when space was a desirable place, and humanity was all into its heroic exploration. The design evokes warm, nostalgic feelings about Earth. Within this graphic prop, homesickness evolves into nostalgia, exchanging the negative melancholy with a positive one. It is what people do to cope with homesickness: they look for what is familiar and try to stay positive. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. But what if there are no lemons on Mars?