The Future from the Past

It’s always amus­ing and often telling to com­pare where we are now to where we thought we’d be. Whether through sci-fi nov­els, advert­ise­ments for the house of the future, or in this case prints from an exhib­i­tion at the Bib­lio­thèque nationale de France (bnf), facets of the future­think can provide a par­tic­u­larly pris­matic view of past pre­oc­cu­pa­tions. Paleo-Future Blog has a nice col­lec­tion of images of life in the year 2000 from the BnF. Nat­alie has weighed in on how pres­ci­ent these illus­tra­tions actu­ally are.
One thing that springs to my atten­tion is the sense that the future was going to free us from con­tact with the ground. Flight seems to make so much more pos­sible. In a pos­it­ive way, with long-distance cruise air-ships, our own per­sonal fly­ing vehicles, or appar­atus enabling fire­men to fight fires from the air and res­cue those in dis­tress. Real­ist­ic­ally, the artist also recog­nizes the need for aer­ial police to main­tain order in the newly crowded sky.
The com­plex is sim­pli­fied through magical machines, whether the tailor who has a fully auto­mated meas­ur­ing machine that feeds dimen­sions to a second machine that takes fab­ric and turns out fully fin­ished cus­tom­ized gar­ments, or the barber who simply provides com­ment­ary as he manip­u­lates a mech­an­ical vari­ant that cuts sev­eral pat­rons hair sim­ul­tan­eously.
The view of school is very inter­est­ing, raw mater­i­als (books) are com­mit­ted to a saus­age grinder, where they are trans­formed into impulses and trans­mit­ted dir­ectly to learn­ing caps on the heads of the stu­dents. (The unfor­tu­nate child who has to power the machine raises the ques­tion of who he is rep­res­ent­ing, being denied this pablu­m­ized know­ledge). Are the books con­sumed by the process…they don’t seem to be emer­ging.
Is the archi­tect dir­ectly car­ry­ing out the con­struc­tion pro­cess a telling com­ment on the effi­ciency (and con­tri­bu­tion) of the French labourer? Yet, the archi­tect works from a plan, simply punch­ing instruc­tions into con­sole, not merely craft­ing dir­ectly from inspir­a­tion.
In all these images, the middle layer of inter­me­di­ar­ies seem to be removed. Trades are elim­in­ated through mech­an­iz­a­tion, but ser­vitude is not. Pro­fes­sion­als are empowered by pro­gress, but are those elim­in­ated raised up or cast down, or simply allowed a life of leis­ure able to indulge in end­less frivolity such as the fest­ival of the roses?
Ques­tions aside, these vis­ions sug­gest some of the prob­lems that the artist per­haps saw as sig­ni­fic­ant enough to war­rant rec­ti­fic­a­tion.
The fire­men with wings seem to speak to a fear of build­ing heights and con­flag­ra­tion.
I am not sure of why, but strolling is expec­ted, but oth­er­wise hav­ing to walk is not accept­able. Thus, innov­a­tion such as powered skates if one has to mingle in the ground­bound milieu. How­ever, optim­ally streets have become a ped­es­trian only zone, as mech­an­ized trans­port has moves to the air. Is this a com­ment on the ini­tial res­ults of the com­ming­ling of the mech­an­ized and the ped­es­trian. The horse is miss­ing from all pic­tures, except where it is seen purely as a curi­os­ity.
War has become very auto­mated, and espe­cially mobile, yet, the same French politi­cians of the time go on to con­struct the Mobile war…and yet the Maginot line springs from this same era.
There is clearly a sense that com­mu­nic­a­tion and trans­port­a­tion will enable and that the then cur­rent pace stands in society’s way. More, faster, farther all seem to be demon­strated, but then these are the com­mon hopes and expect­a­tions of society’s from early times. Its the other com­ments that can tell us much about the zeit­geist of 1910.
Check out the full exhib­i­tion as I have only chosen a few choice images.