Bogotissimo!

I am 23.

It follows from that that a few years ago I was going through adolescence, and then through the sophomoric stage around 18-21. By then I experienced that urge, typical of those two phases, for newness; of being my own contemporary, of keeping a firm grip on the Zeitgeist (preferably by the balls), of being aware and maybe part of what was going on. (This led me - again pretty typically - to flirt with the works of some authors and artists I am terribly embarrassed about today. And in public, sometimes, to boot.)

Not that I don’t still care about these things. But I have realised of late how dated most of my, oh, adolescent/sub-21 Zeitgeist feels, looking from today. Milorad Pavic is still on the crush-list, for example, but as a grandfatherly figure, as someone whose high time was when I was a toddler. But if Paul Auster had published his New York Trilogy today, I would have just met it with a yawn. (Don’t ask me about Foster Wallace; I have no idea what I was thinking.)

I complain that Peter Greenaway has gone senile, from one of cinema’s last hopes to the director of Tulse Luper and the man responsible for that dreary Last Supper installation. But could we suffer The Pillow Book today? Text, body, inscription? The easy gimmicks of his non-narrative cinema promises?

And on the more popular front - which is where the Zeitgeist really is, I would inform you by the time - I find it funny how movies like Lola Rennt or bands like the Flaming Lips are intolerable now. Even the stuff that is still likeable, like Serial Experiments Lain (yeah, anime), again I can’t quite imagine happening today.

I was excited over Takashi Murakami when reports and pictures of the 2001 Los Angeles “Superflat” exhibition spread. Today I roll eyes most impatiently when the eager arts or design student mentions his name.

The list goes on. Sometimes I would feel there was something missing in the whole Zeitgeist thing, some story that was not being told, blame it on the sorry state of culture (it’s easier when you are in the Third World) and feel the need, like Alec Linderbergh, that someone sound a Call-to-Arms - this expectation itself dated, quite High Modernist. The irony is there is not really a Zeitgeist when you are young, it hasn’t quite formed yet, there is only the shadows of older people - who will either give you anxiety of influence or embarrass you shitless as you wise up. To make matters worse, ours was a post-modernist, post-structuralist shadow that makes the whole “Zeitgeist” concept troublesome (though I never really met a bona fide sub-21 po-mo kid. Of course a lot of us have tried.). So, what, it’s been less than a decade, which makes this then versus now talk sound funny. I don’t really know what “is going on right now”, but I think my grip now is tighter than when I was certain I had it mostly figured out.

I am reporting this because I just learned earlier tonight that there is a transhumanist friend-of-friend in my social network. Yes, a transhumanist in 2008, in Brazil, 2-step distance in my social bloody network. I’m baffled.

1969 video on Internet shopping and banking, home surveillance cameras and stuff. But, as usual with retrotech, they missed women’s lib.

Web Zen covers vintage.

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”

(…)

Since there was no such thing as electronic data storage in the 1920s, Otlet had to invent it. He started writing at length about the possibility of electronic media storage, culminating in a 1934 book, “Monde,” where he laid out his vision of a “mechanical, collective brain” that would house all the world’s information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network.

—

meanwhile, at modernmechanix (light of my life, fire of my loins): color television in 1929.

organ-playing robot from the 1980s. via pink tentacle

WABOT-2, an intelligent humanoid keyboard player developed by Waseda University in the 1980s, was considered the most advanced robot of its time. In addition to camera eyes that could read musical notation and deft hands that could tap out tunes of average difficulty, WABOT-2 could listen to accompanying singers and adjust its tempo, as well as carry on basic conversation. The android demonstrated its musical skills at Expo ‘85 in Tsukuba, Japan with a performance of Kitaro’s new age classic “Silk Road.”

I’m so hard in love with modernmechanix. This blog catalogues cool retrofuturist stuff from old science and technology magazines. The archives are huge, and choke-full of cool stuff. I haven’t dug through a tenth of their stuff yet, but picked a few examples at random:

The Future We Were Promised: Online exhibit on Arthur Radebaugh, futurist illustrator from the 50s and 60s.

the mail system of the future.

Unfortunately the gallery doesn’t include many of my favourite of his (from the series Closer Than You Think, in which he speculated on technology that would be available by the turn of the millennium). Later I’ll see if I can find them elsewhere.