In „Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures“, Mark Fisher describes how the imagination of the future is being formed by the relationship of contemporary culture with the present. In his view, popular culture of the 2000s had lost it‘s ability to express it‘s present:
While 20th-century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet. We remain trapped in the 20th century
This cultural inability of articulating the present had resulted in culture referencing avant-garde aesthetics of past times, times in which culture was more able to have a grasp on their present and even their future. As a result, „futuristic“ looks had become a “style“ that is referenced at any moment in time when an actual vision of the current present and future is not available:
The ‘futuristic’ in music has long since ceased to refer to any future that we expect to be different; it has become an established style, much like a particular typographical font. Invited to think of the futuristic, we will still come up with something like the music of Kraftwerk, even though this is now as antique as Glenn Miller’s big band jazz was when the German group began experimenting with synthesizers in the early 1970s. (…) If Kraftwerk’s music came out of a casual intolerance of the already-established, then the present moment is marked by its extraordinary accommodation towards the past. More than that, the very distinction between past and present is breaking down. In 1981, the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today. Since then, cultural time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity.
Describing Futurism as a style, not a movement seems obvious, nevertheless I realized its a crucial thought for my understanding of many things happening in culture and technology today.
Some examples:
- Elon Musk is wearing leather jackets when presenting the Tesla truck, a car obviously designed after 1980s sports cars like the Delorean.
- The NEOM project is referencing architecture studies of 1960‘s superstudio for it‘s cybercity concepts.
- Many tech products reference 1960‘s century consumer aesthetics (especially BRAUN/Dieter Rams) to convey a sense of being cutting edge and „from the future“.
2C5F09AB-45D8-47FB-8C29-0EEBD6C1F032.webp Illustration of „Continous Monument“ by superstudio ^[A building as big as the world: the anarchist architects who foresaw endless expansion(The Guardian)]
F1C4FCC4-A4F9-4E4D-AD01-FEE8289A4267.webp Illustration of „The Line“ by NEOM ^[Oliver Wainwright explores the architectural history behind Saudi Arabia’s planned The Line megacity (Archinect)]
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