The State of Piria has decided, after consulting the citizens in a referendum, to throw in the towel and self-destruct in view of the collapse that is coming. “Dear citizen: the current system is no longer viable,” says the governor of the nation. “There is nothing to do, civilization has no remedy. The government has resigned, all the knowledge has been sent into space in a rocket, all the production and transport infrastructures have been closed, and survival kits have been distributed among its inhabitants, for the restart that is coming (includes a bottle of champagne). The land will be distributed among all the people so that they can prepare their new home and carve out a comfortable future in community. From now on, the Pirianos will be the only ones responsible for the system that you have chosen to implement in your local community ”, says the governor.
Piria’s self-destructive state does not exist, but it is the protagonist of an imaginative installation by Raphäel Stevens, co-author of the book Collapsology (Arpa Editores), and the studio NORMALS, that can be seen in the exhibition The Great Imagination, stories of the future, curated by Jorge Camacho, until April 17, 2022 at the Telefónica Foundation Space, in Madrid. The exhibition is dedicated to exploring the images of the future that, throughout history, humanity has been conceiving and showing in its cultural products, and that have been very dependent on each present.
“The first imaginations about the future were very optimistic, they sought to represent ideal societies, over time certain concerns arise and are produced, not so much dreams, but possible nightmares, as if we had lost our innocence”, explains the curator, who is futures design expert. In times of crisis like these, after the pandemic and with the different existential risks that arise, imagining the future becomes more interesting.
Pioneering futurologist Jim Dator classified the futures that humans envision into four categories: sustained growth, transformation, discipline, and collapse, each with its own winners and losers. “We want to encourage people to stop thinking about the future in terms of optimism and pessimism, utopia and dystopia,” says Camacho. The collapse is the category that exemplifies the aforementioned state of Piria, and also dystopian films such as Contagion, Mad Max or Blade Runner, in which civilization faces major disasters and dystopian scenarios of various kinds, whether environmental, technological or economic.
The discipline scenario presents a future of authoritarianism and social control, as in the series and novel The Handmaid’s Tale or in The Hunger Games. The transformation proposes a radical turning point such as the one that relates to technological singularity (a theory that maintains that the advancement of technology and robotics could end up surpassing and eliminating us) and posthumanity. In other words, technology bends the course of history towards unsuspected consequences.
The most promising is the sustained growth scenario, where civilization progresses as expected, for better or for worse, as seen in movies like Elysium or Matrix Revolutions, or in the prospects of companies, governments or the media. Everything changes, but everything remains more or less the same. The four cases of Jim Dator are represented in the exhibition with different installations expressly devised for the occasion by different artists and studios.
What was the future like before?
Humanity did not always think about the future, there were times when changes were minimal and slow, people were born and died and nothing seemed to evolve. Speculating on possible futures seemed pointless. The ucronías inaugurated the thought on other possibilities of civilization, as it is the case of the Utopia of Tomás Moro, The city of the sun by Tomasso Campanella, The new Atlantis by Francis Bacon or Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. In the exhibition they are interpreted by the Javier Sáez Castán National Illustration Award. “However, these were stories that did not happen in the future but in other places in the present, such as on lost islands or at the end of exotic trips,” says Camacho.
One of the first properly futuristic stories could be that of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, entitled The year 2440 and published in 1771, with a difference between reality and fiction of 669 years. The author falls asleep and wakes up in a future where the monarchy survives in Paris, but the economy is fairer, wars are scarce, inequality has been smoothed out and less work is done. Those were the times of the Enlightenment, when things began to change more rapidly, supported by science and reason, and the idea of progress was generated: humanity was beginning to look ahead. “You begin to see the usefulness of thinking about the future, because the future can be built from the present,” explains the curator. It is the philosophy of the current foresight exercises, such as the recent report Spain 2050 of the Pedro Sánchez government, whose purpose was perhaps not understood by certain sectors of the political and social arc.
A diagram shows a chronology of the appearance of these types of works (they increasingly abound as the 20th century progresses), and compares the date of conception of the work with the date that you imagine in the future. It is found that the stories of the future are increasingly located in closer dates. Series like Black mirror or Years and years they deal with possible futures in a handful of years and the problems they pose in issues such as technological development, the environmental emergency, the migration crisis or the rise of totalitarianism are so plausible that they are scary. It is difficult today to imagine a future as far away as Mercier or HG Wells envisioned in The time Machine, that placed the action in the very remote year 802,701. Although authors such as the Chinese Cixin Liu in his trilogy The three-body problem they also venture hundreds of thousands of years into the future.
One reason for this reduction in the speculative distance may be due to the Great Acceleration that the sample also deals with: in the second half of the 20th century, many parameters of civilization have begun to grow exponentially, especially due to the action of human activity in the environment, what some have described as a new era, the Anthropocene, which has its roots in the Industrial Revolution. The world population grows dramatically, the temperature of the planet, the Gross Domestic Product, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, the consumption of water, tourism, the use of energy, fertilizers or telecommunications. The Great Acceleration has also encouraged and accelerated thinking about the future, although perhaps it has also made it look shorter, because everything can change very quickly. “In other times it was thought that the future was written and that it could be predicted,” says Camacho, “now we think that it is not so predictable and that the most we can do is propose different possibilities for alternative futures.”
The future in everyday life
Beyond macro perspectives, the exhibition also focuses on the micro, on people’s daily life and how it is imagined in the future. For example, it is common to find allusions to video conferencing in many cultural products of the 20th century: today futuristic video conferencing, talking between science fiction spacecraft, is common, especially after pandemic lockdowns. We hardly appreciate the wonder. Cities are the most common territory of the futuristic imagination (Metropolis by Fritz Lang is an unavoidable reference) and numerous models of future cities have been planned, overcrowded, automated, with increasingly taller buildings. Something similar happens with cars and other means of transport.
In the past he envisioned a future of flying cars, robotic butlers, and ideal, decaying or crowded cities. Not all this has happened as imagined, but sometimes it has happened in a similar way, although at the time they seemed ridiculous ideas. Gender roles were also imagined in certain ways, as can be seen in the sample: in the expected super-automated kitchens, women were always the ones who lived happily with the most advanced appliances. Although there are also examples of versions of a future woman more integrated in professional life or in the army.
Imagination about the future is not just a thought experiment: “It is a factor that participates in the creation of the future. Many of what we imagine encourages people to do new things, to devise things, to change things, so that a feedback loop is formed between what we imagine about the future and the future we build ”, concludes the curator.
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