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Retrofuturism

Retrofuturism (adjective retrofuturistic or retrofuture) is a movement in the creative arts showing the influence of depictions of the future produced in an earlier era. If futurism is sometimes called a "science" bent on anticipating what will come, retrofuturism is the remembering of that anticipation.[1] Characterized by a blend of old-fashioned "retro styles" with futuristic technology, retrofuturism explores the themes of tension between past and future, and between the alienating and empowering effects of technology. Primarily reflected in artistic creations and modified technologies that realize the imagined artifacts of its parallel reality, retrofuturism can be seen as "an animating perspective on the world".[2]

For the Triple H album, see Retro Futurism.

Etymology[edit]

The word retrofuturism is formed by the addition of the prefix "retro" from the Latin language, which gives the meaning of "backwards" to the word "future", a word also originating from Latin.


According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an early use of the term appears in a Bloomingdales advertisement in a 1983 issue of The New York Times. The ad talks of jewellery that is "silverized steel and sleek grey linked for a retro-futuristic look". In an example more related to retrofuturism as an exploration of past visions of the future, the term appears in the form of “retro-futurist” in a 1984 review of the film Brazil in The New Yorker.[3] Critic Pauline Kael writes, "[Terry Gilliam] presents a retro-futurist fantasy."[4]

Historiography[edit]

Retrofuturism builds on ideas of futurism, but the latter term functions differently in several different contexts. In avant-garde artistic, literary and design circles, futurism is a long-standing and well-established term. But in its more popular form, futurism (sometimes referred to as futurology) is "an early optimism that focused on the past and was rooted in the nineteenth century, an early-twentieth-century 'golden age' that continued long into the 1960s' Space Age".[5]


Retrofuturism is first and foremost based on modern but changing notions of "the future". As Guffey notes, retrofuturism is "a recent neologism", but it "builds on futurists' fevered visions of space colonies with flying cars, robotic servants, and interstellar travel on display there; where futurists took their promise for granted, retro-futurism emerged as a more skeptical reaction to these dreams."[6] It took its current shape in the 1970s, a time when technology was rapidly changing. From the advent of the personal computer to the birth of the first test tube baby, this period was characterized by intense and rapid technological change. But many in the general public began to question whether applied science would achieve its earlier promise—that life would inevitably improve through technological progress. In the wake of the Vietnam War, environmental depredations, and the energy crisis, many commentators began to question the benefits of applied science. But they also wondered, sometimes in awe, sometimes in confusion, at the scientific positivism evinced by earlier generations. Retrofuturism "seeped into academic and popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s", inflecting George Lucas's Star Wars and the paintings of pop artist Kenny Scharf alike".[7] Surveying the optimistic futurism of the early twentieth century, historians Joe Corn and Brian Horrigan remind us that retrofuturism is "a history of an idea, or a system of ideas—an ideology. The future, of course, does not exist except as an act of belief or imagination."[8]

Characteristics[edit]

Retrofuturism incorporates two overlapping trends which may be summarized as the future as seen from the past and the past as seen from the future.


The first trend, retrofuturism proper, is directly inspired by the imagined future which existed in the minds of writers, artists, and filmmakers in the pre-1960 period who attempted to predict the future, either in serious projections of existing technology (e.g. in magazines like Science and Invention) or in science fiction novels and stories. Such futuristic visions are refurbished and updated for the present, and offer a nostalgic, counterfactual image of what the future might have been, but is not.


The second trend is the inverse of the first: futuristic retro. It starts with the retro appeal of old styles of art, clothing, mores, and then grafts modern or futuristic technologies onto it, creating a mélange of past, present, and future elements. Steampunk, a term applying both to the retrojection of futuristic technology into an alternative Victorian age, and the application of neo-Victorian styles to modern technology, is a highly successful version of this second trend. In the movie Space Station 76 (2014), mankind has reached the stars, but clothes, technology, furnitures and above all social taboos are purposely highly reminiscent of the mid-1970s.


In practice, the two trends cannot be sharply distinguished, as they mutually contribute to similar visions. Retrofuturism of the first type is inevitably influenced by the scientific, technological, and social awareness of the present, and modern retrofuturistic creations are never simply copies of their pre-1960 inspirations; rather, they are given a new (often wry or ironic) twist by being seen from a modern perspective.


In the same way, futuristic retro owes much of its flavor to early science fiction (e.g. the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells), and in a quest for stylistic authenticity may continue to draw on writers and artists of the desired period.


Both retrofuturistic trends in themselves refer to no specific time. When a time period is supplied for a story, it might be a counterfactual present with unique technology; a fantastic version of the future; or an alternate past in which the imagined (fictitious or projected) inventions of the past were indeed real.


The import of retrofuturism has, in recent years, come under considerable discussion. Some, like the German architecture critic Niklas Maak, see retrofuturism as "nothing more than an aesthetic feedback loop recalling a lost belief in progress, the old images of the once radically new".[9] Bruce McCall calls retrofuturism a "faux nostalgia"—the nostalgia for a future that never happened.[10]

Themes[edit]

Although retrofuturism, due to the varying time-periods and futuristic visions to which it alludes, does not provide a unified thematic purpose or experience, a common thread is dissatisfaction or discomfort with the present, to which retrofuturism provides a nostalgic contrast.


A similar theme is dissatisfaction with the modern world itself. A world of high-speed air transport, computers, and space stations is (by any past standard) "futuristic"; yet the search for alternative and perhaps more promising futures suggests a feeling that the desired or expected future has failed to materialize. Retrofuturism suggests an alternative path, and in addition to pure nostalgia, may act as a reminder of older but now forgotten ideals. This dissatisfaction also manifests as political commentary in Retrofuturistic literature,[11] in which visionary nostalgia is paradoxically linked to a utopian future modelled after conservative values[12] as seen in the example of Fox News' use of BioShock's aesthetic in a 2014 broadcast.[13][14]


Retrofuturism also implies a reevaluation of technology. Unlike the total rejection of post-medieval technology found in most fantasy genres, or the embrace of any and all possible technologies found in some science-fiction, retrofuturism calls for a human-scale, largely comprehensible technology, amenable to tinkering and less opaque than modern black-box technology.


Retrofuturism is not universally optimistic, and when its points of reference touch on gloomy periods like World War II, or the paranoia of the Cold War, it may itself become bleak and dystopian. In such cases, the alternative reality inspires fear, not hope, though it may still be coupled with nostalgia for a world of greater moral as well as mechanical transparency. It has been argued that retrofuturism, through finding hope in the disappointment and dystopia, and using that hope to push towards a brighter future, can be optimistic. Similarly, the visions of utopias depicted in retrofuturistic pieces can re-instill that hopefulness in audiences that have lost it.[15]

Kraftwerk's 1975 album showed a 1930s radio on the cover, its inlay (which for its later CD re-release was widely expanded as a booklet illustrated in the same nostalgic style) showed the band photographed in black and white with old-fashioned suits and hairdos, and the music in its instrumentation as well as its ambiguous lyrics were (besides the other obvious theme of nuclear decay and nuclear power referenced by the album's titular pun) in homage to the "Radio Stars", that is the pioneers of electronic music of the first half of the 20th century, such as Guglielmo Marconi, Léon Theremin, Pierre Schaeffer, and Karlheinz Stockhausen (due to whom the band referred to themselves as but the "second generation" of electronic music).

Radio-Activity

The European version of the band's 1977 album had a similar 1930s-style black and white photo of the band members on the cover (the U.S. version even had a cover of a vintage-style colored photograph in the style of Golden Age Hollywood stars), the style of the sleeve design as well as the design of promotional material tying in with the album were influenced by Bauhaus, Art Deco, and Streamline Moderne, the record came with a large, hand-tinted black and white poster of the band members in early-1930s style suits (where band member Karl Bartos later said in Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution that their intention was to visually resemble "an interwar string orchestra electrified" and that the background was meant to be a pictorial Switzerland where the band was making a resting stop in-between two legs of their European tour on the eponymous Trans-Europe Express), the song lyrics referenced the "elegance and decadence" of an urban interwar Europe, and in the promo clip made for the album's title song (shot in black and white on purpose) and other promotional material, the eponymous Trans-Europe Express was portrayed by the Schienenzeppelin first employed by the Deutsche Reichsbahn in 1931 (footage of the large original was used in outdoor shots, and a miniature model of it was used for shots where the TEE moved through a futuristic cityscape strongly reminiscent of Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis).

Trans-Europe Express

The cover and sleeve design of the 1978 album exhibits an obvious stylistic nod to the Constructivism of 1920s artists such as El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, and László Moholy-Nagy (due to which band members have also referred to it as "the Russian album"), and one song references the film Metropolis again. From this album on, Kraftwerk would also use their "show-room dummies" aka robot lookalikes on stage and in promotional material and increase the use of slightly campish make-up on band members that also resembled 1920s' expressionist make-up that to a lesser degree had already appeared in the promotional material for their 1977 album Trans-Europe Express.

The Man-Machine

 – Chronological inconsistency

Anachronism

 – Period of history since 1945

Atomic Age

 – Art concept by Alvar Gullischen

Bonk Business

and cyberpunk derivatives

Cyberpunk

 – Science fiction genre

Dieselpunk

 – 1939 General Motors exhibit illustrating the company's vision of 1960

Futurama (New York World's Fair)

Hauntology

 – American animated sitcom

The Jetsons

List of stories set in a future now past

 – Architectural and art movement and style

Neo-futurism

Raygun Gothic

 – The making of electric circuits or appliances using older electric components

Retrotronics

Retro-style automobile

 – Science fiction genre inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery

Steampunk

Brosterman, Norman (November 2000). Out of Time: Designs for the Twentieth Century Future. Harry N. Abrams.  0-8109-2939-2.

ISBN

Corn, Joseph J.; Brian Horrigan; Katherine Chambers (1996). Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future. JHU Press.  0-8018-5399-0.

ISBN

Canto, Christophe; Odile Faliu (1993). The History of the Future: Images of the 21st Century. Flammarion.  2-08-013544-9.

ISBN

Kilgore, De Witt Douglas (2003). Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space. University of Pennsylvania Press.  0-8122-1847-7.

ISBN

Heimann, Jim (2002). Future Perfect. Köln, London: Taschen.  3-8228-1566-7.

ISBN

Hodge, Brooke (2002). Retrofuturism: The Car Design of J Mays. Museum of Contemporary Art.  0-7893-0822-3.

ISBN

Onosko, Tim (1979). . Dutton. ISBN 0-525-47551-6.

Wasn't the Future Wonderful?: A View of Trends and Technology From the 1930s

(1978). Futuropolis: Impossible Cities of Science Fiction and Fantasy. New York: A&W Visual Library. ISBN 0-89104-123-0.

Sheckley, Robert

; Richard Horne (2007). Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived. Bloomsbury USA. ISBN 978-1-59691-136-9.

Wilson, Daniel H.

Citations


Further reading

Interesting Engineering 17 February 2021 Fascinating Visions of Our Present From Over 100 Years Ago

– 1950 as seen in 1925

The wonder city you may live to see

– A German site showing numerous illustrations (click the names)

retro-futurismus.de