Category Archives: Futurism

Although they decrease in number with each passing year, classic cars from the 1950s and '60s are part of America's cultural landscape. They're icons of an time when we had just defeated the biggest threats the world had ever known.

The futurism seen in automotive design, art and architecture of that era are pretty good indications that on top of the nation's brewing social unrest, there was a sense of optimism. This is often reflected in the classic car art of the era, and of future artists looking back on the era. What's the most beautiful car-on-canvas painting reflecting this moment in America's existence.

Our nominee is this painting from Danny Heller, a 30-year-old painter from Southern California's San Fernando Valley. He wasn't even alive until the 1980s.

But growing up in Southern California, where mid-century architecture and cars are common, he began to notice that there was something special about that simple space age aesthetic. Houses are low and long, and because of the region's dry, sunny weather many of the cars from that era are still on the road, having escaped the fate of rust belt body rot.

"L.A. and the San Fernando Valley have a car culture. Those old cars were all around me when I was growing up," Heller told us. "My dad had a stingray 'Vette and an old Lincoln, the neighbors had a Chevy Bel Aire. You could drive by Bob's Big Boy in Burbank on cruise night and there would be classic cars in the parking lot."

So when he began painting mid-century architecture and design as his main subject matter, cars were a natural part of the scenery. Painting that scene is a way for him to preserve not just mid-century design, but it's version of hope for the future: Better living through good design. Big windows. Lots of light. Big, space age cars. Enough to go around.

Southern California has changed a lot since rocket tipped Oldsmobiles and suburban ranch homes were in vogue. Our vision of the future has shifted. Although the trappings of that time are still around, like any flotsam of a bygone time they're disappearing. Hipsters love '50s furniture and old, beer-bellied men are fond of finned Detroit iron, but the rest of the world has moved on. Heller thinks his waning, and in many cases dilapidated, SoCal Golden Suburban Utopia Era surroundings are beautiful, and wants to preserve some of it for posterity.

Take a look at Heller's paintings. At first glance, they almost look like photographs. But how does seeing old cars and Palm Springs homes in paint change the way you see them? Does it freeze them in time or do they age instantly? Do they become more or less alive? Has the Golden State dream portrayed in Heller's paintings disappeared completely, or have we reshaped it somehow?

Please share your images from that era and of that era and tell us what they mean to you.

Image credit: Danny Heller

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The Most Beautiful '50s And '60s American Car Paintings [Car Art]

Director Rian Johnson's latest, starring Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is a sci-fi thriller with surprising heart.

Film District

"I don't want to talk about time-travel shit," Bruce Willis tells Joseph Gordon-Levitt early in Rian Johnson's sci-fi thriller Looper. "Because if we start, we're going to be here all day, making diagrams with straws."

It's a good bit of advice, and the film itself is generally wise enough to take it. As the title suggests, Looper has its share of fun with the convolutions and conundrums that take place when folks from the future start tinkering with the past. (One clever and unsettling example involves people etching scars into their own flesh as a means of sending an indelible message to their future selves.) But the movie never allows itself to get bogged down in questions about the physics or philosophy of time travel, the what-ifs and how-comes and why-didn'ts. Leave the structural analysis for the DVD commentary. For all its temporal shenanigans, Looper is to be enjoyed in the moment.

As jobs go, it's not so bad: Joe stands in a field with his pocket watch; waits for his cuffed and hooded prey to appear on the tarp he's carefully laid out; and blammo! Or at least it's not so bad relative to the other employment opportunities available in 2044, which seem to consist primarily of hobo and hooker. The sullen retro-futurism on display in Looper will be familiar to anyone who's seen Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, or their many imitators. City streetsand their denizensare gray with grime; high-tech hover bikes are rare, but old-school shotguns ubiquitous.

There is, however, one catch to Joe's profession: In order to tie up loose ends, the crime syndicates that employ the loopers eventually require them to kill their own future selvesto "close the loop." And when Joe's future self shows up on his tarp one day he's none to eager to have his loop closed.

It's a neat little setup. After Old Joe (again, played by Willis) escapes his rendezvous with mortality, Young Joe (Gordon-Levitt) is held accountable by his none-too-forgiving boss (Jeff Daniels). So Young Joe is tasked with finding and killing Old Joe, even as Old Joe is trying to keep Young Joe alivebecause a dead Young Joe means that Old Joe ceases to exist. And for any whose heads are not yet spinning, writer-director Johnson throws in another loop or two: In the future, Old Joe's wife was killed by a mysterious, Keyser-Soze-like crime lord called the Rainmaker; now that he's back in the past, Old Joe is determined to find this villain as a boy, and snuff him out before he can grow into deadly manhood. But Young Joe falls in love with boy's mother (Emily Blunt), a tough, resourceful farm gal, and he commits to protecting her and her son from the threat posed by his own future self...

Are you following me? If not, don't sweat it. There'll be plenty of time to diagram the whole thing with straws after you leave the theater.

First, though, a few words about the non-time-travel-related question most likely to be on viewers' lips: What the hell happened to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's face? Rest assured, the appealing young star (who got his big cinematic break in Johnson's first film, Brick) has suffered no motorcycle crash followed by problematic reconstructive surgery. Rather, Johnson asked makeup artist Kazuhiro Tsuji to increase Gordon-Levitt's physical resemblance to Willisin particular, his distinctive Roman noseand Tsuji succeeded, depending on one's point of view, either too well or not quite well enough. In either case, we're deep into the uncanny valley here, with Gordon-Levitt calling to mind less Willis himself than a Willis marionette that didn't make the final cut of Team America: World Police.

Happily, Johnson's decision to have Gordon-Levitt go the full Dyan Cannon is an uncharacteristic misstep in an otherwise sharp and self-assured film. Though Looper carries the echoes of many earlier entertainmentsThe Terminator, Blade Runner, Logan's Run, Witness, Willis's own Twelve Monkeysit is a fresh and vivid work of imagination, and a return to form for Johnson following the awkward misfire of 2008's The Brothers Bloom. With Looper, Johnson offers up a mind-bending ride that is not afraid to slow down now and again, to explore themes of regret and redemption, solitude and sacrifice, love and loss. It's a movie worth seeing and, perhaps, going back to see again.

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The Mind-Bending Charm of 'Looper'

Summary: Many companies view SMS as legacy technology, and are bypassing it in favor of apps and new, non-carrier communication services like WhatsApp. The death of SMS is nowhere near, though.

The tech industry attracts the worst kind of futurists, Clayton Christensen-quoting types who behold shifting paradigms, looming inflection points and disruptive innovations everywhere they look.

The futurism business is so competitive these days that technologies get declared dying at the very moment they are actually peaking. In monarchy terms, that's like preparing tocrown the boy prince when the reigning king is a hale and hearty 40-something.

So it goes with text messaging, aka SMS. Nobody disputes that SMS is the king of mobile communications today. 7.8 trillion SMS messages were sent last year, according to Portio Research. Another firm, Informa, counted 5.9 trillion text messages worldwide last year, comprising 64% of mobile messaging traffic. You alsohave research showing that in developed countries,texting has just become more popularthan voice calling.

Not only is SMS on top, but it's still growing substantially. Portio predicted earlier this year that it will increase 23% this year to 9.6 trillion SMS messages.

According to Portio: "SMS is not dead. SMS is still the king and will remain so for some time to come."

Yet, many experts have already declared the death of SMS. Consumers don't care - they're too busy texting. And somecompanies are reaping the marketingbenefits(see Mobile Marketer for more North American case studies and Sybase 365 for the rest of the world).

But too many companies are being persuaded not to invest in SMS or its picture/video-enabled sibling, MMS, in favor of building native apps, or waiting to see what the mobile IM services or Twitter or even fast-rising 'free' Over-The-Top (OTT) services like WhatsApp.

I understand that there is a consumer desire for a cheaper alternative to SMS. ButI think that companies waiting for the death of SMS will wait for a lot longer than they expect. In the meantime, there will be huge costs, in the form of blown opportunities to exploit the right-time, contextual marketing capabilitiesof mobiletoday.

As much as I'm a champion of apps, they remain largely a first-world phenomenon. Globally, smartphones that can run apps were outsold by featurephones by 2:1 last year.

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Text Messaging Still Thriving Despite Smartphones, Twitter and WhatsApp

The bright futurism of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the award-winning sci-fi series that warps into its 25th anniversary Friday, was so unique that the show probably wouldn't get the command to engage today.

"There is not a new hopeful, optimistic vision of the future that I am currently aware of," veteran Star Trek: The Next Generation writer (and Battlestar Galactica rebooter) Ronald Moore told Wired by phone. That shiny outlook, on display throughout seven alternately brilliant and bombed seasons, powered the show into our collective consciousness.

"I'd argue that in the last few decades in America, when people are asked what they hope the future will look like, they still turn to Star Trek," Moore said. "They hope we put aside our differences and come together as humanity, that we rise above war, poverty, racism and other problems that have beset us. They hope that there's a future where we set off into the galaxy to have peaceful relations with other worlds."

Still, some of Star Trek: The Next Generation's 178 episodes stand taller than others. We've beamed up our picks for the best and worst episodes (and feature films) in the gallery above for Trekkies (and Trekkers) to dissect, and tagged them with our own "Make it so?" ratings. Give them a level-one diagnostic and add your own picks in the comments section below for a shot at winning a Star Trek: The Next Generation: Season One Blu-ray collection.

Above:

Otherwise known as the six best episodes starring the franchise's omnipotent trickster Q, a character whose evolution is intertwined with Next Generation's DNA. The Q Files range from theatrical debut episode "Encounter at Farpoint" to the moving closure of the two-part series finale "All Good Things." There are also stops off at the Borg-birthing "Q Who," the hilarious "Deja Q," the Robin Hood-inspired "Qpid" and Capt. Jean-Luc Picard's afterlife fable "Tapestry."

Report! According to Moore, who co-wrote "All Good Things," the Hugo-winning series closer "turned out beautifully, and it had no right to!" Meanwhile, "Tapestry" offered Picard, played by Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart, the chance to overwrite his violent history, even though, as Moore explained, "our past mistakes are what make our present lives possible." The results are Star Trek canon.

Treknobabble? Philosophical. The inscrutable Q are godlike jerks who love to mess with humanity's heads, hearts and lives. But they're also a reliable deus ex machina whose morality plays and cosmological inquiry keep The Next Generation much smarter than today's undead cultural programming.

Make it so? Engage, warp 13!

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The Best and Worst of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Sci-Fi Optimism

Curator Judith Brodie focuses on two seminal works in her excellent National Gallery of Art show, Shock of the News, which documents the stormy, obsessive, often dysfunctional and prodigiously productive relationship between art and newspapers over the past century. First is a classic screed by the Italian poet and provocateur Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, a manifesto of Futurism published in 1909 in the respectable Parisian newspaper Le Figaro. Second is Picassos 1912 collage Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass, which incorporated a fragment of another French newspaper, Le Journal, into an image that also uses a scrap of sheet music and a charcoal sketch to create a flat, schematic map of sensual diversions and cafe life.

Although newspapers had appeared in art before (Cezanne painted his father reading what looks like the Jackson Pollock Daily Herald in 1866), and art had appeared in newspapers with increasingly satisfying results since advances in printing late in the 19th century, the Picasso and Marinetti works announced a new relation between the two media. Picassos pasted-paper construction brought the newspaper as a material thing to the foreground of his picture, while Marinetti suggested new ways for artists to use the larger apparatus of the newspaper phenomenon, its mass appeal and its power to mold public opinion.

Thereafter, what might seem to be two very different wellsprings of inspiration pretty much merged. Focusing on the materiality of newspaper inevitably raised questions about what those little pieces of paper said, which dragged in the jangling, newsy world of politics and war and celebrity and everything else the newspaper promised its readers on a daily basis. And as artists developed a more conceptual approach to using newspapers publishing their own absurdist or self-aggrandizing broadsheets, analyzing and dissecting the hidden mythologies of the news business they often, and perhaps accidentally, made work that is alluring on a purely aesthetic and tactile level.

Shock of the News presents a fascinating cross section of the results, from an original copy of Marinettis testosterone-soaked manifesto (like something Walt Whitmans evil twin might have written had he grown up in a Prussian boarding school) to works done in the past five years, as the newspaper business hemorrhaged jobs, profits and confidence. Paul Sietsemas 2008 Modernist Struggle ink and enamel work, a meticulous trompe loeil rendering of two pieces of newspaper, the New York Times and Los Angeles Times (which includes the headline Modernists Struggle with Traditionalists Over Guns), feels autumnal and reflective, an honorific painting that gives the newspaper the same treatment as a Dutch still life or an old family portrait hanging above the mantel. The precision of his image, including the painstakingly realistic rendering of slight creases and curled corners, is wistful, perhaps loving, and the results are such an accurate rendering of banal objects that attention focuses on the small dissonance between use of the singular in Sietsemas title (Modernist Struggle) and the plural in the headline the artist paints (Modernists Struggle ...).

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‘Shock of the News’ at National Gallery of Art a fascinating cross section of art, news

Dion Lee fused sportswear and futurism in his sleek spring summer 2013 show at London Fashion Week.

The Australian wunderkind, showing in London for the second time, held the crowd of international editors on the edges of their benches as they leaned in for closer looks at his accomplished creations.

The first thing to catch their eyes? That would be the leatherlots of it. Appearing in forensically fitted pencil skirts and jackets, it featured slashed-and-plaited panels that created vertebrae-like patterns down the backs of thighs and spines.

But there was simplicity too, as in the purity of the white, midriff-baring tracksuit that opened the show (yup, midriffs: it's practically a Lee-girl requirement to show it off). Colour filtered into the opening series of white looks in the form of transparent orange panels. It built through periwinkle dresses into more blazers, this time with sea-creature swirls and folded-leather peplums.

Dressesexcellent, wearable dresseswere mostly high-necked, with split, neoprene bodice panels that brought to mind lungs and respiration. Has London given the designer room to breathe?

Theres always a consciousness of the body that runs through the collections, he told us backstage. Particularly with this one, there was that kind of layering and transparency and building those shapes underneath the torso. But it was also looking at parallels between technology and the human race.

Technology, the human race and some mighty fine leather jacketscome back next season, Dion. Youre welcome in London anytime.

See the full collection here

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Dion Lee: sleek, futuristic, leathery

There are predictions, mock-ups, and rumors galore...but this is what the next iPhone could use most.

I've owned an iPhone every year since its 2007 debut. Every one. The reward for such reckless upgrading has been a sense of the iPhone's evolution over those years. What started as a device that had not many apps to speak of, but dripped futurism, has become an always-on, location-aware, frighteningly integral part of my nervous system.

While I've listed what we expect out of the next iPhone, I haven't told you what I want. So, here's my own personal list of what matters most...to me.

Battery life. Honestly, I can't stress this enough. The iPhone's become my all-in-one catch-all device, the one thing other than my keys and wallet that I need to take with me. It's a mission-critical device. I need that device to last at least a full day. The iPhone 4 was very good in this regard; the iPhone 4S, while faster and better in many important ways, needs a top-off around British teatime if I'm spending the night out and have been power-using my phone all day. Battery pack cases and portable charge packs aside, I really want the iPhone 5 (or "New iPhone," or whatever it's called) to meet or exceed the iPhone 4S in battery life. Based on its allegedly larger size, I think it can -- but maybe the larger screen will make it a wash.

Smoother Siri. I appreciate the idea behind Siri, and the iPhone is better for Siri existing than not. Still, I hardly use it. The occasional errors and odd miscommunications Siri and I have when chatting are usually enough to drive me to old-fashioned typing...which over five years I've become very adept at. However, I'm a city-dweller. I understand that hands-free use for drivers and others could be a big part of the next iOS 6 update, and I might own a car soon enough as I prepare to leave the city. I'm willing to give Siri a second chance.

Complete cloud support. I use iCloud quite a bit: for Photo Streaming to my MacBook Air, iTunes Match to eliminate old-fashioned music syncing, and overnight backups (I restored my iPad from scratch via iCloud). iCloud is only halfway there. I want a complete, unchained iPhone life from my Mac. I'd like my HD videos and photos to be synced and even stored and archived in a secondary cloud location, automatically. I'd love better cloud syncing of stored app data and documents. This won't replace a local backup, but it sure will help.

A slightly bigger screen. I don't want a big, honking screen. That's what my iPad is for. I like a pocketable phone. My jeans pockets already bulge enough. Then again, the amount of screen space on the iPhone feels stale. The iPhone has tons of unused space around the screen, and the screen itself has maintained the exact same dimensions as the original 2007 model. I just want the screen to take up as much of that body size as possible.

4G...only if it doesn't chew up battery life or cost me an arm and a leg. See my above comments on battery life. I'm honestly okay with my "4G" HSDPA data on my AT&T iPhone 4S in New York, and I use Wi-Fi hot spots so frequently that I'm not sure I'd crave 4G LTE. I understand the use of 4G in an iPad for a frequent traveler. Sure, 4G on a phone would be a pleasant experience and make for zippier app use. I just don't want to pay a ton for it, and I certainly don't want my iPhone's battery life to dip down because of it. The third-gen iPad's excellent battery life on 4G is promising.

A tad less glass. The iPhone 4 and 4S are beautiful, but they make me feel like I need a case on all the time. The new iPhone looks like it's bringing back the metal, and I don't mind that one bit. Maybe it'll even encourage me to go caseless once in a while -- you know, live dangerously.

Come Wednesday, we'll found out what the iPhone holds.

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What I'd like to see in the iPhone 5

29-12-2009 09:10 Muse ? Lyrics: Ignorance pulls Apostasy and apathy still rules Yeah, you know it's cool Just suck and see A future turn us into silent gods And I won't miss you at all Grounded Boxed in Like the evil in your veins Grounded Boxed in I am stuck with you Fate can't decide Alignment of the planets in your hands Come on, crush our plans Just suck and see A future that won't let you disagree And I won't miss you at all Grounded Boxed in Like the evil in your veins Grounded Boxed in I am stuck with you Feel it, hear it, apathy See it, be it, you'll see

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Muse - Futurism - Video

01-12-2009 15:49 A University of Toronto research assignment. This film explores Futurism, its manifestos and the relationship that modern Science-Fiction illustration and cinema have with futurist imagery. This film demonstrates that futurism is not a dead movement because futurist inspirations are used widely in the modern world.

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Futurism - The Dead Movement That Lives - Video

15-06-2010 14:15 I've always liked the word futurist," says Richard Seymour, cofounder and director of Seymourpowell, one of the world's leading design and innovation companies. "If the definition of a futurist is someone who has a physical effect on the shape of the future, then I'm a futurist." Optimistic futurism, the second in the Eastman Innovation Lab's special edition Into the future video series featuring Seymour, emphasizes the importance of optimism to designers creating the products of tomorrow. "We make the future; it doesn't just happen," Seymour says. "If you stand in the future and, then, draw the present towards you in a series of stepping stones, then, you're liberated to a view of what's going to happen that nobody else has got." Seymour shares some of his thoughts about the future but he draws a line when he says: "I do think I know what the future is going to be in some regards but I'm damned if I'm going to tell you."

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Optimistic futurism - Video