Fragmented musings about time, space, and the future(s).
time and space and yesterday and tomorrow
thinking about walt disney’s idea of “yesterday” and “tomorrow” communities and once more thinking about how we naturally reify time in terms of space.
time is a location, which implies that one can be inside a time and also experience being inside a time.
except 1) times other than the present are inaccessible to us 2) we (choose to?) perceive the present as mundane 3) it’s hard to make sense of the present, as it’s in flux.
i suspect it’s only with distance that we’re able to understand what a certain time meant – bringing disparate moments together into one cohesive understanding of what a time (e.g. the 90s) meant.
and maybe with others we also engage in a sort of collaborative fiction-building to help understand what we just went through.
and i guess i’m interested in time(s) as the product of fictive enterprises. any narrative media (film, literature) presents us with thick, beautiful depictions of times bound in spaces, which shapes our understanding of how these times “must have” been.
but this is hardly new.
hypothetical times, and hypothetical futures.
it won’t be the future until it looks like the jetsons. but even if we get there, would we believe that we made it?
(oh just read fear and loathing in las vegas)
vaporwave as a time-space inducing enterprise.
You Will
even in 202X, lain still feels futuristic, despite its technology being mostly obsolete by today’s standards.
even if our present matches the future portrayed in that at&t “you will” ad, the vhs compression is absent, and so it’s not the same. the fact that it was framed as an imaginative extrapolation creates enough of a cognitive distance to perceive it as a unique space, despite it looking remarkably similar to the space that we’re in right now.
yet if you watch it now, while carrying the background knowledge of what-has-happened in your mind, it’s easy to feel a palpable dissonance as you try to reconcile the tones of the hypothetical reality with our near-identical real reality. the You Wills start to get more and more ominous as the sci-fi novelty of attending a meeting from home rams up against the experience we’re now familiar with of being stuck in yet another zoom meeting. and you can’t even ask the question of what about the future we were promised? because, well, you got it.
times as vantage points
Note for 深町純 – Starview HCT-5808 (1984)
utopian society is normal society from an aerial view.
it’s really quite astounding how we’re able to consider the things around us to be so mundane, but from a distant enough vantage point, maybe then we can recognize the beauty of what surrounds us.
maybe that’s part of what tails was trying to get across with that poem. the current world can’t be the future because it’s still too mundane.
timespace tourism
alternate times are spaces in which we have no responsibility within them. we can just vibe, and take in their aesthetic. we are exempt from their mundanity, just as being a tourist in one locale is a much different experience from living and working there.
Uninspiring; “no dream”
https://shmuplations.com/donkeykong/
9. Uninspiring; “no dream”
The setting is a construction site, which brings to mind laborers—there’s no sense of beauty which inspires you to dream about the future.
this critique of miyamoto’s design document for donkey kong (1981) by nintendo staff (management?) has stuck in my mind since i read it, since it’s very obvious which template of the future they had in mind when they made this critique: that of the space shooter, as seen in space invaders and galaxian and the many clones of both which flooded the market. yet at its core, this vision of the future is fundamentally a threatening one, right? aliens are invading, and it’s up to you to stop them. of course, i doubt that kids back then were thinking especially hard about the implications of an alien invasion; they just accepted it as a valid excuse to do some blastin’. and besides, the likelihood of aliens both actually appearing and actually attempting to destroy humanity was so microscopically slim that any perceived threat was solely within the realm of fantasy. you don’t have to worry about the threatening descending melody of space invaders: they’re not real, and they won’t hurt you.
compare that to a contemporary like missile command (1979), rooted in a hypothetical future of nuclear annihilation that was both very probable and likely only narrowly averted. that one hits much closer to home, and it ends up all the more chilling because of it.
and yet… i think i know what this quote is getting at. that same year, just a couple months after donkey kong, namco would release galaga and i daresay there is something beautiful in its presentation: the ethereal music, the way the alien ships elegantly, galactically dance onto the screen…
they may still be trying to destroy us, but at least it would be a sight to behold.