The curatorial team focuses on human perceptions and reflections on the concept of the future, dividing the exhibition into four sections: Genetic Optimization, Unlimited Communication, Another World, and Crossing Time and Space, leading the audience to read the visual archives and artistic texts presented. Here, the future is no longer vulgarly referred to only imaginary fiction, but its realistic connotation is also pointed out and emphasized. The exhibition subtitle "Technikvisionen zwischen Fiktion und Realität" (Technological Visions between Fiction and Reality) opens up a pathway to an archaeological future where we will experience curiosity, hope, as well as unease and fear.
Today is the future of yesterday
Isaac Asimov, a giant of science fiction literature, once said, "We live in a world of science fiction." As he put it, the fictional technological inventions of science fiction have inspired real creators, and some of the whimsical ideas of previous generations are now taken for granted in our daily lives. Thus, the "flashbacks" in the exhibition are familiar yet unfamiliar to the viewer: at the end of the 18th century, a chess-playing device claiming to be able to play with humans was designed with an exotic human figure in its appearance. It was taken around Europe and America and defeated many challengers, a list that included political figures such as Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin. Decades later, it was discovered that this was in fact an elaborate hoax, with a real person with excellent chess skills hiding inside the machine and secretly manipulating the doll. Although the fake intelligence scam was debunked, enthusiasm for machine intelligence never waned - a historical image taken in 1962 echoes the chess-playing mannequin, showing an IBM engineer demonstrating how to play checkers against a computer. Another "flashback" appears in an illustration from the 1930s, in which the artist envisions a future in which communication is no longer bound by time and space. In the foreground are two noblewomen enjoying an afternoon tea break outdoors, while an airplane, which has become an everyday means of transportation, is parked in the distance. They are wearing headphones and holding a screen-like portable device to talk in real time with people who are not in the scene. This imaginary scene and today we use smart phones anytime, anywhere video calls are very similar.
In 1939, the World's Fair opened in New York, USA. Instead of sticking to the past, the World's Fair promised to show visitors "the world of tomorrow". The General Motors Company was in tune with the theme and built the highly anticipated Futurama pavilion. The building's appearance is avant-garde even now. It has a large, geometric, streamlined form, with a towering slit in the white, flat wall. Visitors squeeze into the future by winding paths through the gap. The interior of the exhibit is magnificent, with visitors flying over American cities 20 years in the future in comfortable mobile chairs. Theatrical scenic and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes redesigned New York's cityscape, a vibrant model of the city that covers more than 3,200 square meters and contains more than 500,000 buildings, one million trees and 50,000 motor vehicles traveling on a three-dimensional traffic path. Geddes accurately predicted the future surge in the number of cars in the United States and developed an automated highway system based on the principles of safety, comfort, speed and economy. The "dream of the future", with its foresight, profoundly influenced later urban planning, industrial design and the way of life of the city's inhabitants, and the future of yesterday has become the future of today. In the historical context of the time, the optimistic glimpse of a dazzling future also had a special relevance: Americans, already recovering from the Great Depression, were eager to prosper. Even as the dark clouds of war in Europe began to spread, industrial and technological progress gave them great confidence: "Tomorrow's world is a beautiful world."
Flipping Utopia
In 1909, the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Futurist Manifesto in Milan. The manifesto was a clear "love of the old and the new": old and outdated political systems, artistic traditions, and ideologies should be abandoned, and the Futurists rebelled against everything that was dirty and decaying in the passage of time; while the speed and violence symbolized by the newly emerging technological achievements of electricity, automobiles, and machinery were wildly admired by them. The proud futurists saw the future as a verb, and their path of action, which led to radical transformation, was modern warfare. They believed that war, which destroys everything that exists, is the ultimate form of art. Only war could establish a new order and allow for a cultural rebirth (Risorgimento). Futurism supported a hot war, and a predictable and controlled future became the object of competition between the two later Cold War camps. The German illustrator Klaus Bürgle conceived the form of a human lunar homeland in 1970. The choice of this subject was undoubtedly influenced by the U.S.-Soviet space rivalry of the time. The struggle revolved around the technological prowess of both sides, and the lack of skepticism, even naivety, in the judgment that "technology will lead to progress" emerged from both camps. In the utopian atmosphere created by the supremacy of technology, the artist could easily believe in things that were not necessarily possible in light of serious scientific and engineering developments at the time, as another of Bugler's works depicting a pneumatic subway (Personenrohrpost) shows. Pneumatic transport technology was originally used for small parcel deliveries over short distances, using the pressure difference created by air compression or partial vacuum to propel objects into motion. As early as the end of the 19th century, however, the technology failed in its application to human-carriageable vehicles. Bugler revived this vintage technology at the height of the Cold War with a bold move to use it for high-speed transportation. However, his vision no longer seems absurd today. Elon Reeve Musk, the new technology mogul, can be considered a follower of his. Musk's proposed Hyperloop has shades of the Bugler pneumatic train.
The future does not necessarily lead us to a beautiful utopia, a cautious view held by the German Expressionist science fiction silent film "Metropolis" released in 1927. The story is set in 2026, one hundred years after the film's completion. The subtlety of the film is that it not only predicts the dichotomy between the poor and the rich social classes, but also depicts the complex and subtle web of relationships between man and machine. The picture of the future in the film is somewhat similar to our reality today. The film's perfect ending is based on social criticism and faith reconciliation, which transcends the realpolitik level of utopia or anti-utopia, and deals with the proposition of human self-redemption in an enlightening way. On the poster, man, God and machine are superimposed into a heroic subject, symbolizing moral and religious renewal. Such chimeric beings have also been seen in the recent experimental art of scholar Pinar Yoldas. Using gene editing techniques, Yoldas has "designed" a large number of embryonic sculptures that have eliminated certain defects or deliberately retained certain characteristics. These optimized images of human infants are eerie and uncomfortable. The effects of genetic modification, such as eugenics, sensory enhancement, and immortality, raise ethical difficulties that threaten our understanding of our own nature. We have to put a big question mark after the word future. The future will hardly remain in stasis anymore, and the utopian notions associated with it keep flipping: from utopia to anti-utopia to anti-anti-utopia.
In his book Archaeology of the Future, Fredric Jameson makes the following judgment: "Postmodernity and the pluralist subject position of late capitalism turn the notion of utopian change into an additive resource in the great collection of artifice and seduction that late capitalism possesses. " The ever-flipping utopia, however, is unwilling to fall into the above-mentioned trap or to be treated as a mere cautionary fable. It is in perpetual tension with realpolitik, and it wants to preserve the freedom and dignity of the individual. It constantly asks us the question: what is the existence of the particular and specific "I" in a setting where private property is abolished and society is collectivized? If art is realized and popularized as the aestheticization of everyday life, has it really disappeared? Are people living under surveillance capitalism limited in their ability to act? If Cyberspace has destroyed the symbolic distance between metaphor and reality, does it replace the real with the simulated "real"? Such questions are hidden in the gray zone between fiction and reality, urging and warning us.
Critical futures studies
Futures Studies examines past and present understandings of the future, and on this basis analyzes future trends and developments, anticipates possible challenges, and prepares strategies to deal with them. The discipline's concerns go beyond the traditional scope of the natural and social sciences. Its diverse and even haphazard methodology and the inability to test some of its assumptions have often led to debates about whether it can be classified as a science. But taking a step back, futurology can be considered an art. In the eyes of British artist Suzanne Treister, the potential future is a composite of technology, society, and faith. Treister was inspired by the exploration of the frontiers of theoretical physics to create her series of rustic watercolor paintings, Survivors. The artist reinterprets the human conceptual system in an attempt to reveal the hidden supernatural forces between all things in the universe. She is inspired by mysticism to create new technologies in the post-Internet era, such as telepathic transmission, super artificial intelligence communication, etc. She is also quite sensitive to the experience that can never be separated from our discussion of the future, namely the experience of Zeit-Raum (time and space).
The vision of the future does not occur only when humans enter the modern age, but always accompanies the spatio-temporal experience. The future is the description of the unexperienced space-time after the conceptualization of space-time experience. The archaeology of the future has a double temporal orientation: first, it points to the past. Those cases that have already happened write the conceptual history of the "future". We are excited to correspond to the future predicted by our predecessors with the technical results that have already been realized, a positive proof that relies on logic. However, futurology is not a prophet, and what has been realized may be only one of several possibilities. It is the unrealized or seemingly impossible today, even beyond what is known at the moment, where the real potential of futurology lies. The archaeology of the future also points to the present and the future, to a mixture of what is and what is not - history thus becomes an object waiting to be realized, a synthesis of all possible scenarios. The "visions" referred to in this exhibition summon the potential of history to be realized, and many of the works include contemporary artists striving to reconstruct reality. No longer lost in a jungle of possibilities, they choose practical paths, giving imagination and responsibility to techniques and creations full of sensuality. Through art they change the present and thus the future.
Founded in London, England, ecoLogic Studio is an innovative blend of digital technology and environmental design. The eco-installation, called Photo Synthetica, is made of natural materials and resembles a human lung in form. It consists of a number of translucent "alveoli", each structural unit filled with green algae. The reproducible, regenerative algae capture carbon dioxide and other pollutants in the air and release oxygen through photosynthesis. The green lungs effectively reduce carbon dioxide levels in the environment in response to climate change, while transforming pollutants into nutrients for plants, filling the missing link in the metabolism of materials in the city. The green lung is a model of eco-friendliness that combines design and aesthetics to reassess the relationship between people and the environment. It can be attached to the façade of a building, contrasting with the cold appearance of modern urban architecture. Today, such bio-curtains have been hung on buildings in Dublin. Meanwhile, Senegal, on the other side of the globe, still suffers from environmental degradation. It is the most polluted place in Africa. Consumerism has accelerated the output of waste, and the lack of action on environmental slogans is exhausting. Artist Fabrice Monteiro travels here to create a fictional "The Prophecy" that encompasses elements of animism, local religion and superheroes. The protagonist of the myth is a goddess of Earth sent to other realms of the world, unable to continue to endure the destruction of humans and exhausted by the normal cycle of nature. Her descent is to convey a warning to humanity. Monteiro collaborated with costume designers to morph local trash waste into high-class and gorgeous costumes in different pollution scenarios. Its exceptional beauty pierces the visual illusion and draws the viewer's attention to the precarious reality. The photos were published in major news agencies around the world, and the Senegalese authorities immediately reacted positively and began to take environmental action.
In an interview in the mid-1980s, Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Herman Lem said, "Science fiction is the countless amount of paper consumed by trying to cure the terminally ill." This pessimism probably stems from his sober perception of the limits of science fiction literature and futurology at the end of the Cold War. However, the exhibition "Back to the Future: Technological Visions between Fiction and Reality" is relatively optimistic and places its hope in the hands of responsible interdisciplinary artists and social practitioners. We should all follow their example, to promote change in the here and now, and to actively empower futurology with critical potential. Only in this way can humanity transcend the dilemmas of the present and stop fearing the challenges to come.
Article Source:艺术与设计
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