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Retrofuturism
- hawski 6y agoI see a new wave of futurism with solarpunk. I hope it will catch on.
- avindroth 6y agoI think of Bioshock when I see that word
- erlapso 6y agoAgreed, as in: Steampunk is actually a form of retrofuturism
- pizzicato 6y agoThe Wikipedia article does describe steampunk as a high-profile example. Also interesting to note the two non-distinct forms of retrofuturism: "the future as seen from the past" and "the past as seen from the future". Steampunk is an example of the latter.
- akaktsn 6y agoI’d be curious if there is someone designing art or tech in this style.
- pizzicato 6y agoCyberdecks[0] come to mind. There seems to be quite an active modding scene; I remember seeing a few Pi-based ones recently. [0] https://www.cyberdeck.cafe/ https://www.cyberdeck.cafe/
- egypturnash 6y agoZillions of people. Usually it gets called steampunk (18xx) or dieselpunk (193x-194x). 195x-6x futurism usually ends up going very Googie. And we’re starting to see 70s/80s retrofuturism, mostly I’d say the word associated with that is vaporwave. More art than actual tech, and most of the tech is one-off hand-built stuff.
- Swizec 6y agoWould cyberpunk count as 90s retrofuturism? Or have we decided it hits too close to home for present times?
- irscott 6y agoNah cyberpunk is it's own thing and the aesthetic way predates the 90s.
- jerry1979 6y agoCassette Futurism for the '80s. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CassetteFuturism https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CassetteFuturism
- stryan 6y agoVaporwave, despite using a lot of 80s samples, is generally more associated with the 90s. Vaporwave is all about the simultaneous apex and decline of mall culture, consumer excess in optimism of the post-Cold War, and early WWW aesthetic. 70s/80s would be Cassette Futurism and Sythwave.
- tomphoolery 6y agomy favorite style of art!
- flanbiscuit 6y agoBack in the Google Reader days I subscribed to a few Retofuture blogs. Was really into this stuff back in the late 90s and early 00s. Love the scientific optimism. Not surprising that I am a huge fan of EPCOT, it had a huge impact on me as kid going there in the 80s. This was one of the blogs I enjoyed, have not kept up with it: https://paleofuture.com/ https://paleofuture.com/
- JetSpiegel 6y ago> This was one of the blogs I enjoyed, have not kept up with it: https://paleofuture.com/ https://paleofuture.com/ Matt Novak moved to Gizmodo a while back: https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/ https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/ Did not know he had that site as an archive.
- peter303 6y agoVarious parts of Disneyland exhibit versions of retrofuturism. First is the original tomorrowland, a future of rocketships, futuristic cars. Next came EPCOT of the 1970s on the heels of Earth Day and environmental sensibilities. Then both tomorrowland and EPCOT were reburbished with a future of computers and videao games. Most recently it is the Star Wars experience "long ago and far away" another blast from the 1970s.
- narag 6y agoI love 60s and 70s retrofuturist style, white everywhere and rounded shapes being the most recognizable marks. Starwars was very much in that style: R2 and Luke, with a revival in episode I and maybe II. Rest of the movies were much darker.
- aresant 6y agoNot sure there’s a finer visual artist to produce in the medium of retrofuturism than Syd Mead - passed away late last year unfortunately but left an inspiring catalog and vision of the future that I imagine will endure a very long time -> https://www.iamag.co/the-art-of-syd-mead/ https://www.iamag.co/the-art-of-syd-mead/
- sprash 6y agoIf you like Syd Mead check out Klaus Bürgle. To me he nails the Futurism genre like nobody else. Here[1] are some "Space" pictures starting as early as the late 1940s. 1.: http://klausbuergle.de/buergle_weltraum1.htm http://klausbuergle.de/buergle_weltraum1.htm
- sjsone 6y agoGetting some Sovietwave vibes from this. Like: https://open.spotify.com/track/7lrNwcY54nhgmMbPtTcx9A https://open.spotify.com/track/7lrNwcY54nhgmMbPtTcx9A
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoHYPERLOOP! http://klausbuergle.de/images/buergle/750/Personenrohrpost_dnu84_1967.jpg http://klausbuergle.de/images/buergle/750/Personenrohrpost_d... edit: Personenrohrpost How fitting.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- airstrike 6y agoThanks for this. Here are some more easily downloadable images in case others also want to find a new wallpaper: https://wall.alphacoders.com/unregistered.php?id=6436 https://wall.alphacoders.com/unregistered.php?id=6436
- fanatic2pope 6y agoMakes me think of OMNI magazine.
- undershirt 6y ago“the future according to the past” as my writing teacher called it quite pithily
- sitkack 6y agothe bigger mistake, isn't the future according to the past but the future according to the present, which is on the cusp of becoming the past. It is almost impossible to see the now, we are too close to focus. My favorite in tech is that someone is porting from a legacy system. No that isn't how it works, you port from a legacy system to a future-legacy system. Be timeless and love your future self.
- undershirt 6y agothat’s profound. we should have drinks. your comment resonates with the thesis that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism—that our inability to imagine and provision for the future, is the death of our imagination, of our transcendence, and the world. I like your take on it, that love has to point in every direction of time, timeless.
- sitkack 6y agoIn the zeitgeist of HN, The Fence [1] and that everyone was doing the best they could at the time, we need to have empathy both for the past and for the future. That is why we strive to make things better. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
- undershirt 6y agochesterton’s fence is great. I’ve recently appreciated the synthesis of the conservative and progressive impulses—to respect what has come before as it encodes unseen wisdom, but to recognize that there are fundamentally new things happening that we must account for.
- dang 6y agoRelated from 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18966421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18966421 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8148570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8148570
- rutherblood 6y agothis remembering of the past and what they thought about us can mostly only mean one thing: we ourselves can't and haven't been able to think of the future.
- themodelplumber 6y agoIt's subjective remembering though, so this message would primarily apply to those who are creating such content or consuming it. Those are the ones for whom your viewpoint may be true. Others do create / conceptualize "new" futures, though I would add that a lot of this is a metaphor for big-picture ideas and general creativity drawn from the yet-unknown, which are then birthed into the present (the future present ;-)). These people have a tough job to do, because audiences like HN share the tech space with them, but tend to be relentlessly critical of wild new ideas at the same time. We are that retro-future crowd that's short on (or generally annoyed by) new ideas, many of us.
- jbay808 6y agoI mean, there were also some remarkably prescient predictions made at the time. But the more accurate they were, the less likely they'd define a retrofuturistic artistic genre.
- pm90 6y agoThat's one possible way to look at it. The art of the present and the past is strongly influenced by the technological innovations that society has access to. However, there isn't any reason why the art of yesterday can't be used with the technology of present. e.g. rotary telephones were designed because that was the only option to dial numbers; but someone might find that kind of telephone to be nice today because of the user experience (just a wild example) and they could be made today but with IC's etc.
- bityard 6y agoSee also: false nostalgia
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- paypalcust83 6y agoWhat then is the converse of retrofuturism where the present or future is represented with a mix of obsolete technologies along with contemporary and/or hypothetical future ones?
- heyitsguay 6y agoSteampunk?
- magicsmoke 6y agoA post-apocalypic present with ancient and highly advanced technologies unearthed from ruins that humanity no longer has the skill to remake. Miyazaki's Nausicaa comes to mind. Or maybe a world where technology is futuristic but the societal structure is from the past. Warhammer 40k, the Roman empire but in space.
- remarkEon 6y agoProbably Blade Runner or the Alien universe (which is the same universe, depending on who you ask).
- chubot 6y agoThere is an analogy to computing here. I mentioned a couple of 30+ year old books here about what the future of software would be: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22093100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22093100 by Brad Cox (inventor of Objective C) and David Gelertner (CS professor and entrepreneur). I guess you could make Retrofuturistic software now by writing modern versions of those old ideas (which didn't turn out to be economically feasible / adopted, at least in the exact form predicted, although in some cases they were influential.)
- bpiche 6y agoGibson's excellent collection of short stories, 'Burning Chrome', contains a story called 'The Gernsback Continuum' which is very explicitly a retrofuturist work, I think. Maybe one of the best! In the first few paragraphs of the story he also uses the term 'raygun gothic' to describe this idea. I won't spoil it for you, but there are people in pulp sci-fi spacesuits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gernsback_Continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gernsback_Continuum
- rayalez 6y agoFallout is probably my favorite example of that.
- pm90 6y agoCame here to say this. Not a video game fan but the series has a charm that I found very hard to explain to friends. The genesis of that world is interesting enough too: a post-apocalyptic world which mixes the old and the new out of necessity, rather than a deliberate desire to model things on the past.
- throw_m239339 6y agoBioshock as well, although maybe it's more "steampunk".
- Strilanc 6y agoSee also: Zeerust [1] > Something — a character design, a building, anything — used to be someone's idea of futuristic. Nowadays though, it ironically has a quaint sort of datedness to it more reminiscent of the era the work came from For example, a science fiction show from the 50s showing a video phone with a rotary dial. 1: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust
- valeg 6y agoNetflix's "Maniac" is an interesting recent example of retrofuturism in a show.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y agoAlthough, it is obvious, you cannot be close to the reality if you trying to predict more than 10 years upfront, to be more or less realistic, you have to go back from the present back as many years as you want to go into future and observe what did not change. Then extrapolate to the future that has changed and what has not. Say in 10 years we'll still have AMD64 computers on our desks, albeit 50% faster, we'll still be running Windows and Linux, we;ll probably have more than 10% cars running on electricity, we'll still be wearing jeans and t-shirts, yet there will be subtle change in the social order, perhaps a bad pandemic, change in social networking platforms etc.
- close04 6y agoWe can't really imagine the distant future because we are very biased about the past and present. And we also can't account for developments that are entirely new. People always imagined the future full of flying cars because cars and planes were the big thing so the combination must also be big. But nobody really imagined "social networks" 100 years ago, which are way bigger now than flying cars. They had no indication that this could possibly be a thing, at least not in their current form. We imagined/had forums and all sorts of communities but not really close to the current idea of social media.
- goto11 6y agoScience-fiction tend to underestimate social changes compared to technological changes. The classic example is Asimov where we have an intergalactic empire thousands of years in the future but with gender roles stuck in the 1950's. Videophones are everywhere in SF, but who predicted people would prefer text messaging with emojis? Smartphones and climate change crisis was predicted many times, but who predicted transsexual rights would become a divisive political issue in the US?
- close04 6y agoSciFi creators are also bound by the fact that their creations must be commercial successes. Touching on sensitive social topics can get in the way of that and it's the best way to get a lynch mob at their door. So even if one could have predicted in the '30s anything related to race and gender-related emancipation they would have been buried along with their work. Fancy futuristic tech? Yes, please! Radical social reform ideas? Solid nope.
- mseepgood 6y agoThe future was better in the past.
- krebs_liebhaber 6y agoMark Fisher (RIP) made a good point in this vein: our vision for the future is stuck in the '70s and '80s. If you watch a really old sci-fi movie like Forbidden Planet[0] (or listen to its rather incredible proto-industrial soundtrack[1]), you get the distinct feeling that it's "cheesy" or "wrong", that its vision of the future has fallen greatly out of sync with our own. This feeling diminishes as you go forward in time, and basically subsides entirely once you reach the eighties. Throbbing Gristle, Kraftwerk, Blade Runner, Akira... all "futuristic", even to modern eyes and ears. Is this due to improvements in visual effects and electronic instrumentation, or have we "given up" on the future in a very real sense? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWQbnyHNY3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWQbnyHNY3k [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unSrf-htPbk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unSrf-htPbk
- cainxinth 6y agoNostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
- ysr23 6y agoThere is a nice video 'in praise of retrofuturism' on the BBC Ideas page: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/in-praise-of-retrofuturism/p081y8lk https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/in-praise-of-retrofuturis...
- throw_m239339 6y agoTime to read Jules Verne books again.
- gitgud 6y agoPeople once envisioned a fantastical future, where energy was practically free, allowing endless possibilities for transport and construction. What almost nobody predicted is that information would become practically free thanks to the internet....
- m4rtink 6y agoWell, energy is also almost free once you get some megascale space projects going. Sun is putting out a lot of energy that currently just radiates out to empty space.
- stolenmerch 6y agoI was always under the impression that Lloyd Dunn coined the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Dunn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Dunn
- solarkraft 6y agoThanks for giving it a name, I love this stuff. Old visions of the future are amazing. I love the German film "Richtung 2000" (towards 2000) from 1972 [0] (should be understandable auto-translated). It's great to get a sense of the situation at the time (oil crisis, the aero train just having been announced) and evaluate what of it has actually happened. They were right (albeit about 15 years off) about many major things: Home automation, shopping and talking over the internet, a lot of work being automated away, the psychological issues these innovations cause ... Sadly they were also wrong about many of the great things that should've happened by now. Space exploration has barely progressed (damn, I'm glad SpaceX exists!) and we still don't care nearly enough about our environment/quality of life to have electric vehicles and good local transit. It's weird to see that so many of the things going on today were so predictable. It paints a concering picture of our future. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4U2zW4IPDY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4U2zW4IPDY