The future was better in the past.
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
Retrofuturism
71–80 of 82 posts
Re: Retrofuturism
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for this, I did not know about Syd Mead, but just flipping through the images on that page it's clear how influential he was. Wikipedia lists pretty much exactly the associations I made: > Mead worked with major studios on the feature films: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, Tron, 2010, Short Circuit, Aliens, The Spirit of '76, Timecop, Johnny Mnemonic, Mission: Impossible III, Elysium, Tomorrowl…
> That is, he almost exclusively addresses the technological advancement, while keeping the societal structures largely intact. Looks like it to me too. Which is probably far more realistic than all the "society will radically change thanks to technology" takes. In the last 70 years we've seen technological advances we couldn't have dreamed off yet society is in most parts still the same as it was back then. Sure, pr…
It depends what you mean by "progress."
No one imagined Facebook and Twitter or even Microsoft and Apple. But also no one imagined gay rights and other progressive changes, or the general change in social register and emotional tone.
What hasn't changed much is - ironically - movies and science fiction itself. All the old 50s tropes - superheroes, militarism, mutant superpowers, apocalyptic alien evil, sentient robots - are still around today, although sometimes with more of a dystopian slant than was usual back then. And with much better visual FX.
It's not so much that retrofuturism is a thing, it's more that neither SF nor tech ever really outgrew it. There's been no shockingly unexpected and mind-expanding culture of neo-futurism to replace it. (Yet.)
Re: Retrofuturism
#73I’d be curious if there is someone designing art or tech in this style.
Zillions of people. Usually it gets called steampunk (18xx) or dieselpunk (193x-194x). 195x-6x futurism usually ends up going very Googie. And we’re starting to see 70s/80s retrofuturism, mostly I’d say the word associated with that is vaporwave. More art than actual tech, and most of the tech is one-off hand-built stuff.
Vaporwave, despite using a lot of 80s samples, is generally more associated with the 90s. Vaporwave is all about the simultaneous apex and decline of mall culture, consumer excess in optimism of the post-Cold War, and early WWW aesthetic.
70s/80s would be Cassette Futurism and Sythwave.
Re: Retrofuturism
#74Thanks for giving it a name, I love this stuff. Old visions of the future are amazing. I love the German film "Richtung 2000" (towards 2000) from 1972 [0] (should be understandable auto-translated). It's great to get a sense of the situation at the time (oil crisis, the aero train just having been announced) and evaluate what of it has actually happened.
They were right (albeit about 15 years off) about many major things: Home automation, shopping and talking over the internet, a lot of work being automated away, the psychological issues these innovations cause ...
Sadly they were also wrong about many of the great things that should've happened by now. Space exploration has barely progressed (damn, I'm glad SpaceX exists!) and we still don't care nearly enough about our environment/quality of life to have electric vehicles and good local transit.
It's weird to see that so many of the things going on today were so predictable. It paints a concering picture of our future.
Re: Retrofuturism
#75People once envisioned a fantastical future, where energy was practically free, allowing endless possibilities for transport and construction. What almost nobody predicted is that information would become practically free thanks to the internet....
Well, energy is also almost free once you get some megascale space projects going. Sun is putting out a lot of energy that currently just radiates out to empty space.
Re: Retrofuturism
#76I see a new wave of futurism with solarpunk. I hope it will catch on.
Re: Retrofuturism
#77Not sure there’s a finer visual artist to produce in the medium of retrofuturism than Syd Mead - passed away late last year unfortunately but left an inspiring catalog and vision of the future that I imagine will endure a very long time -> https://www.iamag.co/the-art-of-syd-mead/
Simon Stålenhag does really great work that if not considered retro-futurism proper is something else that doesn't seem to have a name but certainly is at least in a space adjacent to retro-futurism. http://www.simonstalenhag.se/
Nathaniel Halpern (Legion) created an amazing adaptation of Stalenhag's artwork for Amazon. It's unlike anything I've ever seen and definitely worth a watch.
https://www.engadget.com/amazon-tales-from-the-loop-simon-st...
Re: Retrofuturism
#78“the future according to the past” as my writing teacher called it quite pithily
the bigger mistake, isn't the future according to the past but the future according to the present, which is on the cusp of becoming the past. It is almost impossible to see the now, we are too close to focus. My favorite in tech is that someone is porting from a legacy system. No that isn't how it works, you port from a legacy system to a future-legacy system. Be timeless and love your future self.
that’s profound. we should have drinks.
your comment resonates with the thesis that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism—that our inability to imagine and provision for the future, is the death of our imagination, of our transcendence, and the world.
I like your take on it, that love has to point in every direction of time, timeless.
Re: Retrofuturism
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
the bigger mistake, isn't the future according to the past but the future according to the present, which is on the cusp of becoming the past. It is almost impossible to see the now, we are too close to focus. My favorite in tech is that someone is porting from a legacy system. No that isn't how it works, you port from a legacy system to a future-legacy system. Be timeless and love your future self.
that’s profound. we should have drinks. your comment resonates with the thesis that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism—that our inability to imagine and provision for the future, is the death of our imagination, of our transcendence, and the world. I like your take on it, that love has to point in every direction of time, timeless.
In the zeitgeist of HN, The Fence [1] and that everyone was doing the best they could at the time, we need to have empathy both for the past and for the future. That is why we strive to make things better.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
Re: Retrofuturism
#80Gibson's excellent collection of short stories, 'Burning Chrome', contains a story called 'The Gernsback Continuum' which is very explicitly a retrofuturist work, I think. Maybe one of the best! In the first few paragraphs of the story he also uses the term 'raygun gothic' to describe this idea. I won't spoil it for you, but there are people in pulp sci-fi spacesuits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gernsback_Conti…
One of my favourite William Gibson stories. A little gem!
Indeed :)