“the slippage of contemporary life into sci-fi”
In yet another onto-it post (from 2006) by Geoff Manaugh on his BLDGBLOG he throws up some enticing potentials about future aeroplanes printed out of plastic and the imagined potential of bio-printing.
But where it gets really interesting for me, is where he starts to discuss how contemporary life is slipping into sci-fi, and “Science-fiction and social realism will become one and the same thing.” Becoming increasingly future-focussed (reading between the lines) is valuable for the way it sparks, or encourages imaginative, open exploration of ideas. He yawns at much of american fiction that seems to have missed the boat here, going on to say that:
Run-of-the-mill student architectural proposals are already more stimulating than most of today’s American novels. Architectural proposals have ideas.
Emphatically future oriented eras have a history, of course: the 60s and 70s are famous for it. That lovely recent book, Fear and Fashion in the Cold War, tells that story through fashion rather well. This not only raises questions about the relationship between fear and fashion, but more profoundly about the relationship between fear and becoming future-oriented.
There is a far greater smell of fear in the air now than in the 80s or 90s, for instance. S11 is perhaps our most obvious turning point there, from which we can see a trajectory through which the looming threat of terrorism, climate change, financial crisis, pandemics, etc have become swollen, indefinable forms, and elusive, moving targets of paranoia. Brian Massumi, btw, has written some wonderful papers on threat, fear, and the way that politics uses these opportunistically.
So, are we running from the present in order to escape into a less fearful tomorrow? Or, do we make that leap as a projection of today’s fears into dark futures? Or, are we becoming compelled to expand our frames of reference, inhabiting a thicker, deeper duration in order to finger present potential, like a rich compost in which we can grow lovely things?
I guess the choice is ours.
sergey
This is really interesting article. It seems to be an everpresent trend in the history of human-earth (earth when humans became present on it). Remeber all the ancient prophets – they were predicting the future, bad and good. Especially a lot of them are discribed in the Bible, when they are moved by God to project the consequences of peoples’ actions on to future – bright or gloomy. Vikings also had “sci-fi” fantasies – the war of gods, their deaths and an emergence of a new one god and society.
For the last several senturies it were not the prophets as such but the writers and artists who acted as sci-fi predictors. For example, Jules Verne dreamed about the travel to the Moon in the rocket or going beneath masses of water. And here we go, now, people are already thinking of going to Mars and have been drifting the deapths of oceans in such machines that even he would not dream of.
Who knows, if soon we will have a launch of Enterprice…
In my oppinion, it is true that we are looking for escape of reality in living in scy-fy productions and its realisation brings it alive. It won’t fix our problems (probably create more), but it all comes to our nature to control. We feel secure when we can control environment (while animals seem not to care much about it, they would be still there even if we would not exist).
May 14, 2009 @ 6:17 pm