Great piece/ it’s fun to fantasize about futuristic looking places, I get it. I’m a sci fi fan, too. It can also be kind of dumb and pointless in the way a lot of Utopianism is. 80 or 90% of what will exist 30 years from now is already built. And there’s a few thousand years of human traditions of building that deserve to continue. We’d be beyond arrogant to throw that all away.
I think this paragraph captures what I was trying to say:
> Trying not to remix creates boring art. The reason is that you’ll remix things anyway, but you won’t be intentional about it. So you’ll just use whatever is most immediate to your mind: clichés and scenes from your daily life. And so we get the equation again: your vision of the future is the present (because that’s what you’re familiar with) minus the past (because you are not remixing!), plus some cliché futuristic tech, like flying cars.
I definitely agree that we'll discover new aesthetics of progress and it's worth having people work on this problem, but trying to *avoid* retrofuturism is a mistake, I suspect.
Yes, everything is a remix. But, rather than think of it as avoiding retro-futurism, I would think more about being aware of the problems of mid-century high-modernism specifically, and drawing more from other sources when remixing. For example, the Works in Progress print edition reads to me as heavily inspired by Art Nouveau, which in turn seems complimentary to Solarpunk. There are many good sources to pull from :)
Yes, definitely! Retrofuturism is great IMO specifically because "retro" contains multitudes. I would probably pick a different name for the thing you're arguing against!
Great piece/ it’s fun to fantasize about futuristic looking places, I get it. I’m a sci fi fan, too. It can also be kind of dumb and pointless in the way a lot of Utopianism is. 80 or 90% of what will exist 30 years from now is already built. And there’s a few thousand years of human traditions of building that deserve to continue. We’d be beyond arrogant to throw that all away.
Great essay! But I can't not link to my essay where I preemptively disagreed with you four years ago :) https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/retrofuturism-is-futurism-done-well
I think this paragraph captures what I was trying to say:
> Trying not to remix creates boring art. The reason is that you’ll remix things anyway, but you won’t be intentional about it. So you’ll just use whatever is most immediate to your mind: clichés and scenes from your daily life. And so we get the equation again: your vision of the future is the present (because that’s what you’re familiar with) minus the past (because you are not remixing!), plus some cliché futuristic tech, like flying cars.
I definitely agree that we'll discover new aesthetics of progress and it's worth having people work on this problem, but trying to *avoid* retrofuturism is a mistake, I suspect.
Yes, everything is a remix. But, rather than think of it as avoiding retro-futurism, I would think more about being aware of the problems of mid-century high-modernism specifically, and drawing more from other sources when remixing. For example, the Works in Progress print edition reads to me as heavily inspired by Art Nouveau, which in turn seems complimentary to Solarpunk. There are many good sources to pull from :)
Yes, definitely! Retrofuturism is great IMO specifically because "retro" contains multitudes. I would probably pick a different name for the thing you're arguing against!
> We can't actually go back to the future
Sure we can. We're just not let to go.