I am interested in exploring tropes and icons of historical representations of future utopias and dystopias in science fictions films and other pop culture ephemera from the late 1960s and early 1970s. I am specifically interested in the architecture of the spaces that the characters inhabit and the ways that it influences their temporal orientation and their interactions with both each other and the space itself.
The spaces I construct are intended to be recognizable by contemporary audiences as both something futuristic, and also somewhat dated. Based primarily on late modern architecture seen in films of that period, the lines are clean and undecorated, and there is a certain symmetry to the geometry of the space. What is presented is a view of the past that also looks like it may have been in the future, or rather a historical view of what the future looked like then.
I’m interested in the sort of metaphysical problems that these visions create. What is the ontological status of a future imagined in the past that never came into existence? In some cases we are in the future of some of these historical propositions about the future, but our present is very different from what was imagined. In other cases, the future envisioned is so far beyond our contemporary time that we have no way of knowing the potential truth value of the proposed world.
The question then, is what exactly do futuristic things look like now, and why are we still able to identify futurism in an architecture that was created so long ago? In many ways, our contemporary ideas of futurism are not so different from what they were forty years ago. We still expect clean, geometric lines, smooth materials such as plastic or metal, and of course plenty of technological gadgetry. By constructing these interiors out of paper, I am subverting normal expectations of futuristic materials, but I intend to bring attention to the ways in which our conception of the future is entirely constructed in the present.
