Images of THE future through innovation and design Roshnee Desai [DES09273049] MA GRAPHIC MOVING IMAGE // UNIT 1.2// APRIL 2014]
FOREWORD Researching a topic is like picking up the scent of something that already exists around you. When I decided to write on ‘Images of the future through innovation and design’, I wondered how and where I could even start looking for such a vast subject. Then I just opened my eyes and looked around me. I found fossils, clues and relics from thousands of years of creativity, and technological evolution left behind for us. All I had to do is put all the pieces together.
introduction +
contents THIS PAPER ATTEMPTS TO UNRAVEL THE
CHAPTER ONE DISCUSSES ADAPTATION DUE TO
CHAPTER FOUR IS A REFLECTION ON ‘FUTURISM’
UNDERCURRENT OF WHAT DETERMINES THE
PLASTICITY OF THE BRAIN, IT ALSO LOOKS AT PAST
AND WHAT IS IMPENDING FOR US ACCORDING TO
FUTURE. IT DOES SO BY STUDYING FUTURE
PREDICTIONS OF THEIR FUTURE AND ITS VALIDITY
TODAYS FUTURISTS.
FORECASTING IN THE PAST AND TODAY.
AND PURPOSE. I CONCLUDE BY OBSERVING THAT EVERY NEW
THE ESSAY IS DIVIDED INTO FOUR PARTS UNDER
CHAPTER TWO, EXAMINES INFORMATION
SECOND IS CREATING A NEW NOTION OF THE
THE FOUR QUOTES FOUND IN AN EXHIBIT
DEMOCRATIZATION BY THE INTERNET, CREATING
FUTURE. WE ALWAYS LIVE IN THE PRESENT, SO
TITLED ‘ THE END OF THE 20TH CENTURY - THE
AN OPEN SOCIETY WITH INCREASING EQUAL
THE FUTURE IS AN UNATTAINABLE DREAM-PLAN
BEST IS YET TO COME - A DIALOGUE WITH THE
OPPORTUNITY AND IT OUTCOME.
WE ARE CHASING AND CONSTANTLY CREATING.
MARX COLLECTION’ AT THE MUSEUM FÜR GEGENWART (BERLIN), ONE OF THE LARGEST AND
CHAPTER THREE, PONDERS UPON RECYCLED
MOST SIGNIFICANT PUBLIC COLLECTIONS OF
IDEAS AND REASONS FOR RESISTING CHANGE.
CONTEMPORARY ART IN THE WORLD (OFFICIAL MUSEUM WEBSITE: SMB.MUSEUM)
chapter one
“The future isn’t what it used to be.”– Karl Valentin chapter two
“The future belongs to crowds” – Don Delillo chapter three
“The eternal return of the same” – Friedrich Nietzsche chapter four
“Each epoch dreams the one to follow” – Jules Michelet (images: desai roshnee, “quotes from the museum” 2014)
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CHAPTER ONE
“The future isn’t what it used to be.” Karl Valentin In this chapter, using personal and scientific examples, I would like to study the human capacity to adapt to new innovations. Reflecting on Valentin’s quote, I also research what the past thought the future would be.
NEUROPLASTICITY My grandmother (Muktaben, picture 01) grew up a tiny Indian village, with no electricity. She travelled to the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) after marriage where she was introduced to the gramophone, radio and the telephone. She would have to book a call, days ahead, to talk to her son in America, briefly, on a barely audible connection. Today Mukatben lives in America, uses the microwave and dishwasher, watches Internet television, ‘Skypes’ regularly and owns a cell phone. How someone unbeknownst to a light switch, able to comprehend, let alone, use the Internet - in one lifetime?
01. A family photo of Muktaben, my grandmother. (2013)
‘Plasticity of the brain,’ researchers say. ‘The human brain is almost infinitely malleable,’ says Nicholas Carr in ‘What the internet is doing to our brains’. (Carr, 2008) Even as we reach adulthood, the brain does not stagnate, as formerly believed. Instead, it is evolving and learning throughout life. Adaptation – a survival mechanism, helps us comprehend new ideas and inventions. James Olds, (neuroscience professor and director at George Mason University) says ‘the brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly altering the way it functions.’ (Carr, 2008) In the past, neuroplasticity has caused the neocortex of the brain to expand, which has led us to develop language and rational thinking.
‘Just think of the qualitative leaps, that we can’t even imagine today, when we expand our neocortex again.’ says Google futurist, Ray Kurzweil (Immortality by 2045, YouTube), ‘We will be thinking grander, deeper more hierarchical thoughts than before and creating whole new institutions like art and science’
WHAT PEOPLE THOUGHT THE FUTURE WOULD BE. For centuries, ‘Futurists’ - writers, thinkers, cartoonists, artists, philosophers, scientists, designers – have prophesied where mankind is heading. In retrospect, false predictions are humorous. Claims by established newspapers and scientific journals, now bogus, make for fun Internet articles. Google searching ‘what the past thought the future looked like’ generates ‘about 306,000,000 results’. Some predictions have been accurate - sci-fi author and biochemistry professor, Isaac Asimov’s 1964 New York Times article, ‘Visit to the World Fair of 2014’ predicts, in 2014 the existence of the semi-prepared food industry, the fact that only an unmanned ship would have landed on Mars and that boredom would be one of the biggest psychological problems of the time. The idea of ‘big brother’ foreseen by George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) is comparable to what Google, Facebook and government secret services are today. The concept of voyeuristic reality TV shows today, were portrayed in movies like Real Life (Albert Brooks, 1979), The Running Man (Paul Michael Glaser, 1987) and The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) Accurate or not, the vital outcome of these predictions was, giving fodder for the next generation to create their ‘today’ in accordance to these forefathers’ dreams. And that, in essence, seems to be the connection between scientists and comic books. As portrayed in the popular sitcom, The Big Bang Theory (Chuck Lorre & Bill Prady, 2007-present), ‘geeks’ are not only scientists, but also the sci-fi writers, producers and distributors who generate the creative juices that fuel their researches.
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Television’s popularity and the end of wars in the west, saw a rise in sci-fi shows and cartoon series like Star Trek (Gene Roddenberry, 1966), Centurions (Ruby Spears, 1986), The Jetsons (Hana Barbera, 1962). They projected onto our minds the ideas of the future we live in today. And so, we live in a world of ‘Printed food’ (Fab@Home), ‘Visor’ (Google Glass), ‘Universal Translators’ (TalirApps), Tablet Computers, Cell phones and Video-telephony (FaceTime, Google Hangout, Skype). The predictions are about technology, research, food, popular culture, architecture, governance and media – but all ultimately about predicting human behavior.
02. a YouTube video showing what lifestyle of the future was imagined to be in the 1920s.(aaron1912, 1920s – what the future will look like, YouTube) including a project where famous US fashion designers of the time had been asked to forecast ‘What eve will look like in AD 2000’
03. screenshots from centurions | episode: the sky is on fire, produced by ruby spears.
04. images from Star Trek: The Original Series © 1968 Paramount Pictures, produced by Gene Roddenberry.(source: 1967 trading card set, ebay)
05. (facing page) John Elfreth Watkins,Jr.’s article in the year 1900’ the ladies home journal’ aims to predict the year 2000, (image:openculture.com)
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CHAPTER TWO
“The future belongs to crowds.” Don DeLillo In this chapter, I’d like to examine Don Dallilios quote and investigate its true meaning and relevance today. I study the democratization of opportunities brought about by the Internet due to the fall of gatekeepers. I conclude by wondering if the future will have only creators and no consumers.
UTOPIA AND THE INTERNET
NO GATEKEEPERS
For centuries, the idea of Utopia has been a place of abundance - this perfect world where everything is plentiful and beautiful. Be it the Garden of Eden (Genesis, Ch. 2 and 3) or the idea of Paradise (Luke 23:43), the ideas of socialism or democracy, it was all about free-ing society from limitations and being able to get the maximum output out of life and lessen suffering. We prayed, voted, hoped and dreamed, until science saved us.
Alexis Ohanian, (co-founder of Internet start-ups like Reddit, Hipmunk), a direct product of this phenomenon, says in a talk at the 99u conference ‘Traditionally there were gatekeepers, traditionally there were people who decided what succeeded and what didn’t and slowly but surely that is transitioning to a time of great power for the people who are actually the makers, who are actually the doers’ (Ohanian, 99u conference, 2014)
The Internet seems to hold that promise of abundance. It has truly opened up the world to the masses. As Andy Warhol had famously predicted, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” (Sweden, 1968) Knowledge, a source of power, safeguarded by the elite few in the past, is now open to everyone without gatekeepers and filters, hence making the Internet an ultimate ‘library’. However also, as the Internet evolves, it also becomes the greatest ‘stage’ there is, to display all your knowledge - talents, ideas and thoughts.
06. singing acoustic covers of popular hindi songs, canadian jonita gandhi became an internet sensation, leading her to come to india and kickstarting her career as a professional playback singer with oscar winning composer a.r. rahman.
07. a Reddit user named ‘Prufrock451’ asnwered a fictional question on the website’s thread. the answer was a detailed fictional story-script titled ‘rome sweet rome’ which was discovered by warner brothers and is due to be made into a major hollywood movie.
Today, there are millions, creating start up companies, films, novels, scientific projects or just personal blogs on food, fashion, or utter irreverence like hypothetical text messages from your dog (textfromdog.tumblr.com).
Kickstarter.com, a crowd-funding website, is both a propeller and a product of this trend. The website lets people pitch their ideas to the entire global community, and if the idea is powerful according to masses, the community will contribute to fund your dream project. Sounds like a philosophical idea from The Alchemist (Paulo Coehlo,1988), but it is a reality now. On March 3, 2014, Kickstarter passed $1 billion in pledges. The website quoted ‘That’s $1,000,000,000 pledged by 5.7 million people to creative projects.’ (kickstarter.com/1billion) There are growing stories of ordinary people, finding extraordinary opportunities on the Internet, and hence transforming their lives (see 06 and 07) Ohanian concludes: ‘…we don’t actually know where all this is going. In a lot of cases, it is on us to determine where this heads. Does this Internet head to a more open place with more ideas and services, where more people get to come online and we get to benefit from their genius, talent and hard work? I hope so.’ (Ohanian, 99u conference, 2014) Will the future hold billions of micro religions, ideologies and cults? Will everyone be a celebrity, guru or a God? If everyone is going to preach, who is going to listen? We will only have to wait and watch.
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CHAPTER THREE
“The eternal return of the same.” Friedrich Nietzsche In spite of countless inventions and innovations, one cannot help but wonder, are we creating the same things over and over again? Why have certain things never changed? - like a spoon or a chair. We have been scooping our food with the same shaped device and resting on similar objects since centuries. This chapter attempts to reflect on this occurrence and ponder possible answers.
Industries, like fashion and furniture design seem to be constantly inspired by nostalgia of the past. We keep seeing objects inspired by modern, vintage and sometimes even ancient designs in new collections. The radical designs, which have an alienesque quality (eg. Zaha Hadid Architects or installations at V&A’s Radical Fashion ,2001-2002) don’t always receive mass public acceptance and seem to remain artistic or scientific R&D experiments and expressions. It is understandable that our needs and the human anatomy haven’t changed. Yet, can’t there be alternative design solutions to the same problem? Three reasons could be suggested for this repetition of trends -
FEAR OF THE NEW As Socrates feared that writing would make us forgetful, today it is claimed that the internet is making us, ‘skimmers’, ‘bouncers’ (‘Is Google making us stupid?’ Carr, 2008) and an ‘ADD generation’ (Charles Ngo, How to focus in the ADD Generation) Partly true, one can argue the characteristics of skimmers and forgetters don’t change; they just get a new platform.
“We used to evolve every 30 years, now we evolve every 10 minutes. Evolution hasn’t changed, but how fast we do it.” (Aron Dignan, twitter: @arondignan) This hesitation can also be attributed to the comfortable familiarity we feel towards something that has worked for us in the past, and a fear that a new ‘something’ may not serve us as well.
08. a ‘spork’(snowpeak.com)
GATEKEEPERS Our parents, teachers, bosses, traditions, norms, etiquettes, manners, media, gurus, leaders, politicians –almost everyone around us, this invisible social fabric acts as gatekeepers to what is ‘right’ and socially acceptable. All human innovations help hold up this social fabric. How would we ‘eat with a fork and knife’ or ‘dress appropriately’ if the notions of fork, spoon and dress were completely different? The television the first window to the world opened up people to other realities and made normalized new ideas. The Internet, today, is doing the same, as idea consumers become idea generators and hence, their own gatekeepers. The gatekeepers of taste and aesthetics have fallen as well. ‘Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes.’ (Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style, 2003)
MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE Marshall McLuhan’s famous book (‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan, 1964) talks about how the container of one medium is another medium. Applying the idea to inventions eg: The wheel is contained in a clock, a steam engine, a factory machine... eg: The electricity is contained in light bulbs, telephones, satellites… and so on. This temptation to invent things linearly rather than laterally, leads us to discover fewer radically new things. Rather, we prefer to further develop a previous thought. Its feels like we are trying to exploit and exhaust the potential of one discovery before we move on to a new idea. But are we getting stuck, inventing the same things with slight variations under different names? Eg. Spork–fork + spoon) (See figure 8 )
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CHAPTER FOUR
“Each epoch dreams the one to follow” Jules Michelet This chapter attempts to reflect upon the idea of ‘futurism’ and peek into what the coming future holds for us according to today’s futurists.
The article, ‘The Future of Futurism: A view from the garden, looking to the stars’ (Wurgaft, Boom, Vol. 3:4, pp. 35-45) claims that contemporary futurist practices can be traced back to think tanks and consultancies developed during WWII. They would cross reference predictions and “convergence of opinion” translated into “accuracy of prediction” Perhaps that’s why the past images of the future looks less like our actual, practical present and more like a stylistic mood-board of metal, glass and plastics. A Reddit discussion titled, ‘Retro futurism: For the fantastic, dreams of our past’ comments, “Dreams of the future reveal more about the mind of the dreamer than the future itself” (moderators: darkmuck and MyNameIsRobPaulson) As the human mind continues to evolve, so do the horizons of its imagination and dreams, and hence, the future, is constantly evolving.
CONCLUSION
Reflecting on texts by Arthur Schopenhauer ( On the Vanity of Existence, 1851) and Mark Fisher (Ghosts of my Life, 2014), I cannot help but conclude that the future is just an illusion, a perception of linear development. It is unattainable since we are constantly in the present and it leads us like our shadow cast before us. All we have is past experiences and memories, which haunt and influence us. Can we ever, then, dream a radical new future, completely devoid of our past?
TABLE OF INVENTIONS based on my research, i have made the following table of 12 path-breaking inventions that exist today (released or about to be) (today), 10 that are in development (tomorrow) and 10 that are predicted to be in the future (future). TODAY
1) Google Glass (2014) $1500 + Samsung Galaxy smart watch (2013) 2) 3D Printer (2009) $2000 3) Personal Jet Pack (2015 release) $150,000 apx 4) Spray-able energy 5) Raytheon XO2 Exoskeleton 6) Google Prius (Self driving car) 7) Prosthetic Limb with feeling and Successful Bionic eye 8) Nokia HumanForm phone 9) Honda U3X Personal Transport 10) Vertical Forests 11) PetMan 12) Regenerative biology
TOMORROW
FUTURE
1) Singularity
1) Teleporting
2) Cloning
2) Time Travel
3) Virtual Reality + Artificial Intelligence
3) Dream linking
4) Ocean-driven hydropower
4) Shared consciousness
5) Memory Implant
5) Active Contact Lenses
6) Miniaturized medical equipment
6) Smart Yoghurt
7) Open source cars 8) Photovoltaic fabrics 9) Hand Held fusion 10) Invisibility cloak 11) Force Fields 12) Flexible Epaper displays
(Bacteria making electric components) 7) Active Skin 8) Video Tattoos 9) Fully developed Exoskeletons 10) Living on other planets 11) Food Pills 12) Anti Gravity
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TODAY
1.2 samsung galaxy smart watch (samsung,2013) >
2 3D printer (makerbot replicator 2,september 2012) >
< 3 personal jet pack (martin jetpack 2015)
4 bionic eye (second sight 2015) > 1.1 google glass (google, 2014) >
TOMORROW < 3. article in wired magazine (07.06.2009) about hand held nuclear fusion beign developed by pentagon’s darpa
< < 1. article in the independant (23.02.2014) 2. article in the daily mail (23.02.2014)
futurist and google director of engineering, ray kurzwell’s predictions about singularity -artificial intelligecnce, virtual reality and immortality of humans have been creating quite a stir in the media and tech world.
< 4. article in the telegraph (19.03.2010) about ‘an invisbility cloak’ being developed by scientists.
FUTURE
< 1 an article on teleportation research on the website collective evolution (January 16, 2014)
2 a google search result of all the sci-fi tv shows of 2014.>
3 (back cover) illustration by valerie mckeehan and quote by victor hugo >>