A few interesting and random websites I’ve come across or been linked to.
Paleo-Future: a look at the future that never was. I’m a sucker for this stuff because most predictions are hilariously wrong. We were supposed to have baby machines and flying cars by 1980, let alone 2010 (the year me make contact). Granted, some of the predictions are made based more on wish fulfillment and less on using a rigorous scientific method in asserting what is likely to come to pass. Heck, Asimov had spaceships running on nuclear power.
alt/1977 is kind of a reverse take on Paleo-Future’s predictions and instead takes four current electronic devices — an MP3 player, a laptop, a portable game machine and a cellphone and imagines what they would look like if they had been released in 1977. As the artist Alex Varanese writes, “I’ve learned that there is no greater design element than the anachronism. I’ve learned that the strongest contrast isn’t spatial or tonal but historical. I’ve learned that there’s retro, and then there’s time travel.”
Michael Wolf’s Hong Kong architecture: Having looked at how the future didn’t turn out and what the past might have looked like, the final site is a fascinating if somewhat bleak look at Hong Kong skyscrapers, with the camera in close enough to exclude everything but the sheer expanses of steel and concrete reaching into the sky. The effect is somewhat bewildering.
Paleo-Future and Michael Wolf photo links provided by Nic.
