FUTURISM

Not (yet) built: a vision of the future

It would be fascinating to compile a collection of images of the future as they have been created by people throughout the ages. What is the earliest (remaining) expression of ‘future’ that could be at the heart of such a collection?

In some respects the Egyptian pyramids are a reflection of a people’s futurism: for they were built to cater for the afterlife – which essentially is a kind of future for the deceased.

But even though the afterlife may be the eternal future for all of us, I was rather thinking of our fantasies of an imagined, future living world. It would be interesting to establish when exactly mankind started to produce them with the explicit intention of picturing a time beyond their own. In words or in paintings, sculptures – and other architecture than pyramids.

Perhaps architecture indeed is the profession which first took hold of the future in substantive images. Architects were the first great designers and planners. They had to see far ahead. Their whole existence was driven by their vision of some future.





An example of a jump into the future
The old and the new City Hall (now royal Palace) of Amsterdam, 17th century
(Depicting a tower on the New Church that was never built)

But if we focus at the phenomenon of the future, for instance as it is frequently envisaged in our contemporary science fiction: is this kind of fascination with future a pure product of our own time and culture and was, for instance, Jules Verne the first real pioneer in the respect?

Moviemaking and futurism perhaps have been part and parcel of each other from the moment of the conception of the cinema. One of the first real movies was about sending a rocket to the moon, and arriving there. Jules Verne had been its story’s originator.

So, the issue is: what is the history of futurism (not: futurology!) and how can this history best be demonstrated?

It may be true, as some literature on this subject contends (see sources below), that substantive futurist inspiration came with the Age of Enlightenment and Industrialization. This development must indeed have pushed the fantasies of the human mind a giant leap further. Suddenly the world seemed much more ‘engineer-able’. One can readily see that. And again, designers and builders most likely were the most powerful driving forces behind the development of futurist imagery. Perhaps even more for what was not built – at the time – than for the buildings and constructions that ultimately were accepted or approved. This idea is not new. Not long ago a book was published in the Netherlands, called “Never built in Holland”, containing an extensive catalogue of concepts and designs for public buildings which never left the drawing table. Most of these designs, even by hindsight, seem far out of step with the architecture of their own time, many of them being either a gross exaggeration of contemporary styles and fashion, or too visionary. But this, in many ways, is the essence of any ‘futurism’.


Futurism of the nineteen fifties: contemporary trends exaggerated



Futurist painting
This painting of the "Dynamism of a Cyclist" 1913 by Umberto Boccionidemonstrates the Futurist interest in film. Borrowing from Cubism, the Futurists were interested in the dynamics of speed and the simultaneity of the image in motion. Boccioni also created sculptures, which attempted to free the object from its traditional status, creating instead, a fluid medium infused by technology and raw energy.

In another way the subject is about the development and history of human imagination. Its focus over time, from the heavenly to the hellish. From inner space to outer space. Eventually it reached the whole concept of space and time itself. Einstein became the godfather of futurism when science and fiction merged. Without Einstein we would not have created StarTrek in much the same way. Without Einstein we wouldn’t have been fiddling with all the contradictions he revealed about space and time and the (im)possibilities to play with them.

And – one could say: as a kind of (gruesome) intermission between Einstein and our modern world - futurism could also be nourished as a great jump back in the past: witness of this fascination are the designs of Albert Speer for Hitler’s new Berlin, reminiscent of ancient Rome.


Albert Speer’s futurist Berlin of the nineteen thirties

This period was followed by the marriage between moviemaking and space travel. The Apollo 11 mission to the Moon drew many of its concepts from Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey.

In our recent time the greatest marriage is between moviemaking and the pioneers of the information age. No doubt, hundred years hence, our representations of ‘the future’ again will be unmasked as mere exaggerations of trends and fashions already in existence in our own time.


Futurism in the movies
(Minority Report)

I am member of a generation for which ‘change’ and ‘progressiveness’ have been the key obsessions. Our entire sense of progressiveness depends on an active imagination of an unknowable future. We cannot accept stagnation in any dimension. The future holds the sum total of all our current dreams. When we grew up ‘the year 2000’ was magic. It seemed far away and in our minds it was filled with the outmost modernity. And when this magic year came, on the early morning of January 1st, the most remarkable feature of ‘2000’ was that in fact so much had not changed. We didn’t fly in private helicopters, we didn’t transport ourselves to other planets in a whiz, and yes, there were many more huge skyscrapers and large scale traffic networks than – say – thirty or forty years before, but large segments of our countryside had remained unaffected. One could still look at cows grazing in a meadow and at cyclists waiting for a red traffic light.

Indeed, the greatest challenge for any futurist image is its depiction of continuity, of things unchanged. Mankind has already proven its power of imagination and innovation far in excess of immediate possibilities. The idea of ‘future’ inspires gifted visionaries to come with bold breakthroughs for instance in construction, consumer appliances or culture where the average human being would stop at slight improvements only. But to think of aspects, material or otherwise, of our environment and life styles that will not substantially change may well require a similar imaginative talent. In a way, this is exactly what we wish to express when we declare our monuments. It is unthinkable that humanity would ever deliberately tear down the pyramids or destruct the paintings of Rembrandt. In any credible depiction of the future they should be a fixed element.

Futurism is not about senseless dreaming. Mankind is making a progressively larger and more lasting impact over a longer period. Depicting these implications in far reaching futurist images or concepts can be seen as a serious effort to visualize – and integrate – them in a comprehensive concept of the future. One could see this as a ‘scientific’ process but I would consider it not less an artistic one. In this effort we can learn from the futurist images and concepts of the past. Its exhibition therefore would not only serve our curiosity for its own sake. It would equally help us guiding our actions between the fixed and the flexible in every dimension of the heritage we will finally leave behind.

SOURCES

Idea about the future : a history of futurism, 1794-1982.
by Burnham P. Beckwith

Women Artists of Italian Futurism: Almost Lost to History. - Review -
book reviewsArt Journal, Fall, 1998 by Deborah Johnson
http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/findaids/futurism.htm

The Futurism Collection , University of Delaware 1909 - 1969

Revelation, Futurism, and Dispensationalism
By Glenn Weiser
http://www.celticguitarmusic.com/Endtimes.htm

A movie, made in 4000 AD, about ‘us’

What would such movie look like?

Our Age will not disappear without a trace
Let’s assume they still make movies two thousand years hence. It doesn’t matter whether it will be a movie on celluloid or one in digital format or any other – new – technology. We know a movie when we see it. A story to watch and enjoy. It might be a wild experience in 3D with surround sound and shaking floors and any other virtuality to make it feel ‘real’.

We are still busy making movies in our own time about civilizations long gone, so it is highly feasible to project a similar interest of our descendants in the distant future. There are some good considerations for their interest in keeping the memory of the 20th and 21st centuries alive. We will leave a lot of footage for them to watch in the first place. It will be hard for our Age to disappear in oblivion for a considerable time.

Better than 'real life'
Nevertheless we may speculate about the nature and content of a future movie about ‘us’. Much of our modernity will most likely be depicted as primitive or at least as hopelessly obsolete – for instance our internal combustion engines fuelled by oil derivatives, roaring on highways and in cities, our conflicts, our world depletion and mass poverty, and most likely our devastating urbanization in many parts of world, and so on.

Some pieces of history will be subject of reconstruction, perhaps with the aid of ‘real life footage’, not dissimilar from – but substantially better than - the early experiments in our own time with computer aided reconstructions of Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill (see Discovery Channel’s recent experiment). They will for instance allow future movie watchers to get a much closer and highly realistic view of Kennedy’s assassination (his remains might already be taken to a museum for public viewing, much the way we exhibit a good number of Egyptian pharaoh’s) or of other decisive historic developments such as the gradual extinction of species and the rise of CO2 in our atmosphere. We don’t really know, of course, what aspects of our history will prove of interest for our descendants in 4000.

For many of these projections, two thousand years may even be an unnecessary long wait. Much can already – technically - be achieved in our time or in just a few decades. And indeed, many products of our own Science Fiction have had an immediate impact on the short term, thus in our own time. The outstanding example is the Stanley Kubrick movie 2001 – A Space Odyssey, which greatly inspired NASA’s design of Apollo 11, the spacecraft sent out for Man’s first landing on the Moon.

The perspective will be pure speculation only
But the perspective, which people of 4000 AD take of our Age, will be their perspective. We cannot pre-empt that perspective. Still we could try and make a leap forward and look back at the main headings of our centuries. Population explosion, mass production, mass media, mass consumption, mass extinction… all leading to a firm grip of humanity on the prime conditions of our planet. This is not a small achievement, by any standard and - most likely – in any perspective, whenever it is taken.

But this is where realistic projections almost instantly come to a full stop. For we do not know what ultimate – or even intermediate – implications all of these and related achievements actually will have. A movie about us will depict above developments as precursors to a further development, possibly including yet other explosions or – alternatively – the move of mankind towards restraining them.

Furthermore the Western World as we define it today, may still ‘exist’, or whatever world prevails in the future may still have its firm roots in our definition of civilization and in our predominantly European heritage. And this includes all civilizations on either side of the Atlantic.

But it may be not so. There may a massive discontinuity. A movie about ‘us’ could be made by descendants of those who at one point conquered our world and changed it beyond recognition. There might still be the memory of adversity and of our world as being ‘bad’ and the new world being ‘good’, or at least better. We cannot tell. But let’s not exclude that people in the future will look at our celluloid and digital footage largely with disgust and possibly misunderstanding, like the way we look at documentaries of Adolf Hitler’s mass meetings and overzealous propaganda, not to speak of filmed scenes of Auschwitz and the overall aftermath of our horrendous wars.

We cannot 'know' our time because we don't know our future
We tend to look at the pre-WW II years largely as a foreshadowing of the War and the subsequent economic boom of the fifties and the sixties. But we could also look at the twenties and the thirties as the founding years of mass pop culture, the hysteria of the Nazi’s and other similar fascist movements just being an unfortunate – and disastrous - intermission of this essential development.

Basically we cannot predict the way people will look at us in two thousand years because we do not know what is going to happen in the mean time.

Mass hysteria as much as mass pop culture and mass consumption are hypnotic for the larger part of humanity. The Western World has simply created a much friendlier version of human submission to the richness of the happy few than earlier versions of slavery and mass labor. It may still create a similar sense of disgust in the future.

But no civilization so far has drawn disgust only. We do not perceive the old Egyptians or the Greeks and the Romans as outright primitive or barbaric. On the contrary. They can all be seen as building blocks leading to us. Why, we even had a full Renaissance not so long ago that revived the heritage of Greece and Rome to compensate for the cultural, humanitarian and scientific stagnation during more than thousand years of Christianity in our part of the world.

Will there be another great period of stagnation, after which our Twentieth Century heritage will emerge as the prime source of inspiration for a new Renaissance? Most certainly, our time will continue to have its merits in the eyes of future moviemakers (and historians alike, no doubt). Our time brought Einstein and the advent of the Atomic Age. Our time created technologies in a spur never, never before achieved in any civilization. They must count.

The great struggle for any future moviemaker about our time will be how to deal with the many contradictions. Our explosive scientific and technological growth will be offset against our remaining vulnerability for humanity’s vices and superstition. They may look at our world in great confusion and depict us both as highly developed or ‘modern’ but still backward in our political and societal outlook. One cannot overlook the murderous realities across the planet throughout our time.

Our time is a concert
Most likely people in the future will adore our music. I am convinced of that. Much of our music was written for eternity. So, perhaps, a movie about our time will start at the birth of Johan Sebastian Bach, going via Mozart and Debussy to the icons of pop and any relevant successor in the immediate future.

I believe it would be an interesting project to make a movie of our time as if we had already reached the 40th Century. It is like Science Fiction in reverse. A projection of the future leading to a picture of us.

It could be a romantic picture at the level of fictitious individuals, similar to the romantic movies we construct of Biblical times. But is could also be a historic movie of some kind. Some piece of our history blown up to show to people of the future, made by people of the future. We could try and make such movie with their eyes, with their resources and knowledge of our age. In order to do this we would also have to make a few assumptions about their sense of art and drama, of course.

Such a project will indeed be Science Fiction only, even in reverse. But it would be a nice addition to all the other legacies on celluloid we leave behind to watch and, hopefully, to enjoy for many ages to come.

HUMANITY IS IN TRANSITION

Evolution does not stop
We are not the end station, whatever people may think. When we look into the mirror, what we see is a transient face. We are still on the move. Humans will not just stay put in evolution. No way.

What do we expect of humanity four million years from now? Will there still be those who actually resemble us? It has taken us some four million years to become the species we are today, and we started off as a chimp. So really, in such a period much can change. Evolution is ongoing. Whatever we do – or don’t do.

But it is a slow process
In our present day we are very much confronted with the notion of continuity and its opposite: extinction. We have already changed Earth beyond recognition in a minute glimpse of time – just a few thousand years - and killed off countless species, gone for eternity. At the same we influence the wheel of evolution, including the evolution of our own species, unwillingly, and mostly unknowing of the nature and direction of that influence. I believe it will be another few thousand years before solid evidence of ongoing ‘new’ evolution of our species will actually surface.

Gods or Brutes
It may start with new isolation. Isolation is a fundamental prerequisite of evolution. It will most certainly progress through – i.e. by virtue of - adversity. Adversity inflicted by nature, or, as likely, by man himself. It may also be that some quality is being favored by other means, e.g. cultural means: ideal models of fashion may well become ideal models of human progress. We don’t know. We either end up with a Planet of the Gods, or we create a Planet of the Brutes. Both outcomes are plausible, none is more or less unlikely.


White Western Man, 20th and 21st Centuries

Western man goes extinct
We are being warned today that the western white man is moving towards extinction, unless he now starts pro-creating at a more massive scale. Our western civilization is rapidly becoming short of western children. So, at least we are being warned about one possible course of evolution, .i.e. not including the descendants of western modern man. We better make up our minds.

But this is a very narrow view of course. We are just a few thousand years into civilization anyway. Many civilizations must still follow. So let’s be a little bit neutral about it. We cannot claim to be the ultimate civilization, we cannot claim al wisdom and all love such as is needed for the future prosperity of all mankind, for ever. We are still very far from that.

We have only scratched the surface of our brain potential. One Einstein will in the long run be thousands of Einsteins, millions perhaps. There is no end to the potential qualities of man and his descendants at any time in any era.

We still have a chance
And apart from Einstein we have many other things to cherish, and perhaps we have a few things to pass on to the future.. We have our accomplishments. We have our Western Science. We have our libraries. We have our music. We have our ‘things’. There is a lot worth preserving and worth transferring to the next generation and so on. This really is all we are supposed to do. And this includes our genes, in my view.

So yes, let Western Modern Man stay in the competition. Let us secure our fatherhood of all the good things of our kind. Let them have our good things in ten million years, in hundred million years from now. Always.