Contemporary Futurism S/D

Actually, generally speaking anything synth/pulse-oriented -- whether it's Moroder-disco or modern techno or whatever -- still feels like a drive to the future, a strange freedom.

After a few years of DJing, my concerns with electronic music became too practical. I wish I could erase the part of my memory that concerns catalog numbers!

I think to avoid becoming increasingly jaded about the future, we should turn our interests elsewhere - be that into other areas of music/technology or entirely new realms of interest - with the hope of experiencing the wonder of a revolution in those areas.

Am I making any sense?

again, the question...
What works of art, literature and technology make you dream of the future?

Most silly sci-fi futuristic movies get me all excited.

No music/art gives me a sense of 'The Future' any more - the best it does for me now is rekindle a memory of what the past's ideas of the future were - ideas as comic-book-optimistic as jetcars and rocketsuits, like the Bill Nelson schtick of Popular Mechanics and gleaming art-deco-looking space stations; or darker visions of urban-decay, techno-paranoia, totalitarian technology....
The reality seems so much more mundane and trashy - a flood of casual sportswear, people branded as mobile advertising placards, the expansion of adolescence, collapse of social identity into one big 'aspirational' blob, Gigahertz of bandwidth filling up with 'real-life' psycho-drama....TV on a fucking stick whoopee

When I turned 40 in 2000, I tried to remember back to when I was in my teens, and what I thought the world would be like when I reached that age - and it seemed so much less different than I hoped/feared it might be. Even things that might have seemed outlandish >20 years ago and that had come to pass - mobile phones, multimedia personal computers, the internet - they now just seemed....inevitable. Maybe the expectation of progress has been so absorbed, the advance warning so improved, the sense of us as consumers driving it all - instead of The World Of Science-On-High pulling robo-rabbits out of their white coats for the Benefit of Humankind - has so developed, that it all seems to happen close enough, often enough, and gradually enough for it to be taken for granted.
I get the impression that all our models of The Future now are like this: it will just be a smaller/cheaper/faster version of the present, more stuff to buy then throwaway, more tuned to individualistic choices - albeit within a structure of corporate provision. (It is as if our technological processes are also our cultural ones, rather than the other way round.)
But it will also be noisier/dirtier/busier, more biological and biochemical, more chaotic, more finger-snapping impatient and get with the program.....the image of gleaming chrome mega-structures, leisurely strolls through skywalks, minimalist trouser suits or toga-like stately robes, that's gone. (As has the militaristic mirror-image of that utopia - which now looks clumsy and rigid: Big Brother hasn't had to be imposed upon us - we have bought into it as a side-effect of better access to information, ease of communication, buy-now-pay-later, special offers for our consumer loyalties, a fear of street crime, desire for greater entertainment)

Culturally - the future never seems to get here - all it feels like is an ever-more-intense 'present', more knowing of both the past and how to use it to re-present, more concerned with 'feeling' or 'soul' or 'style', more concerned with the Here & Now. (Why care about the future when YOU won't be there to live it?)

Ned, if you still get that reaction you are a lucky (and more imaginative!) man - there was a time when that kind of sound triggered that sense in me too (although not with yr sense of 'freedom' - maybe cos the late 70's UK zeitgeist was a good deal more -ve, maybe cos the frameworks of early 80's synth-pop or late 80's/early 90's rave culture hadn't totally happified The Pulse at that point).
But now when I hear it, all I sense is another slab of the present self-consciously recycling the past - either to produce a nod'n'wink pastiche of that past's take on the future, or to enhance their present credibility by demonstrating their knowledge/invoking the 'authenticity' of history.

Maybe because I don't sense so much time behind it, possibly. I'm not sure...

The only actual futurist representations, in my opinions are, things like drawing for unrealised and unrealisable buildings, some concept cars and the manifestos of futurism. Things that will be in time or will never be.

This doesn't affect how good a certain artwork is. Aphex, autechre et al are sometimes modernist sometimes retro.

There are also two futures to think about. The real and the Utopian/Distopian. Compare say the future described in Blade Runner with that in Logan's run. One appears like a continuation of the present the and the other represent a future sprung from a cathartic break in the Human story. Utopian/Distopian futures tends date much more readily than the 'real' future. Look how dated say Kraftwerk or 80s elctro sound. Still very futuristic, but a future extrapolated from a point in the past along some other timeline.

(thank you, kate, for the original idea for that paraghraph)

I think primarily the Avant Guard sets out from society and then society/indivisuals choose completely different paths. You can only set out from where you are.

Tracer - the funny thing about techno (especially of the minimalist variety) is that the more futuristic records are the ones that are more emotive, generally wistful in tone. a lot of the earlier detroit stuff is positively dreamy compared to the records that Hawtin mixes on the decks EFX and 909 mix, for example. A good example is "my travels" by kenny larkin on his album Azymuth. Anyone with a fast internet connection should check it out.

I have to think about this, as I would like to answer an ILX question seriously for once. The answer form my teenage years would have been "the past is so beautiful, the future like a corpse in snow" (manics).

Just as we need new socialist manifestos we need new futurist manifestos. Its good to draw a line in the stand sometimes.

Typo or not? It works either way! :-)

Is the future more or less grimefree?

my concern = political artists who seek to engage public through self-promotion = chumbawumba!

Now, that's the cool fucking number 6!

Myself I am a Utopian furturist in many respects. I desire to sweep away vast tracts of mediocrity, preserving only the very best that needs preserving (normally the futurisms of of the past rather than romantic blatherings).

On Sant'Elia's drawings, they look fresh because nothing like them has every realised. Sure van de Rohe, Corbusier and others did similar things but nothing ever came close to realising the dreams of Sant'Elia. Nothing has ever soared from the landscape to com close to those drawings. Yet at the same time they do look like the product of the early part of the 20th century, still based on the technology of the time (look at the window frames).