These have been up for a little while but I ran across them at about the same time and thought that the juxtaposition was interesting. I’ve always been kind of fascinated by how people envision the future and whether those visions turn out to be accurate.
The 1939 World’s Fair is probably the most famous past version of the future. Wired recently put up a nice photo gallery emphasizing its architectural influences here and an article about the General Motors “Futurama” exhibit here. It’s interesting to consider the influence that this exhibit had on the next few decades of this country’s economy and infrastructure when you consider that, at the time it was on display, most Americans did not own automobiles and there was no interstate highway system.
The other historical look at the future I found recently is a documentary entitled What the Future Sounded Like. It’s about the British company Electronic Music Studios, usually known by its initials EMS. I had the impression that EMS was sort of a British counterpart to the American synthesizer companies like Moog and ARP, but it turns out that EMS’s history is more complex in that it was a functioning music studio before the people involved started building commercial products. Strangely enough, one member of the organization apparently deserves credit for being the first individual to house a computer in a private residence. The documentary also looks at the change in public reaction to electronically generated music–which is something else which we now take for granted, consciously or otherwise. The official website for the documentary is here, and the entire documentary is now available on YouTube here, here, and here. (It’s split into three parts, probably because of YouTube restrictions.)
