Nik’s blog

The future will feel like the past, but with better technology

I woke up feeling highly disoriented, partly because my head is still on Singapore time, though by now it is perhaps somewhere over Turkmenistan. When I was awoken at 2am by our house guest fumbling for the right keys, and my brain buzzed me to get up and make some coffee, I knew I was in for a fitful night. Further disorientation at 6am, when I finally decided to quit the half-dreams that were so close to reality and so mundane that there was no real point in sitting through them. The room was still dark, except for the streetlight outside. I wanted to put on the mustard yellow T shirt I knew I'd left at the foot of my bed, but as I pulled it to me, it was leached of all colour by the sodium. Staring at the grey cloth, I felt profoundly disjointed, like the world had changed subtly but perceptibly while I'd been tossing and turning, and I had to now get used to the new, greyer reality.

Douglas Coupland reckons that the future isn't going to feel "futuristic", just disorienting. Is this what it's like, then, living in the future? Familiar items taking on new meanings without anyone warning you? I went to the Bicycle Film Festival a couple of evenings ago, a hipster/dickhead-tastic collection of people, most of whom have at least a passing concern with being futuristic, or at least as present-y as possible.

One film summed up why I'm confused. It was very 'now', in terms of the fashion being exactly what a denizen of Shoreditch might be wearing - beards, hillbilly shirts, tight jeans, bare feet etc. There was also a lot of mildly amusing messing about with bikes going on, as well as throwing themselves off buildings and other great heights, often into not-very-deep water. So far, so hipster-Jackass. The whole thing was shot, however, on digital film that had been manipulated to look like vintage, scratchy cine film, with a filter over it not unlike a hipstamatic Polaroid thing. The effect was to feel like we were watching some 1970s home movie of stoopid rednecks doing stoopid things.

Now, fashion trying to evoke a bygone age is nothing new, of course. Even the specific redneck/hillbilly thing has been around for at least a few months, since I saw this lot playing in Columbia Road flower market in early summer:

But I guess the mode of representation has always marked out an image in terms of its time. Truly long-ago things happened in tapestry, then later black and white (though really serious, important or sad things still happen in black and white, of course). Think of daguerrotypes, 1950s pinups, grainy Technicolor movies, stiffly posed colonial portraits with a fade around the edges etc. Conversely, photos/videos of the present always looked like the present because they were as sharp, realistic and now as we could imagine them. At the start of the year, it looked like the defining development in current image production would be 3D, as several industries team up to help make our collective memory even sharper and more mimetic. But has Hipstamatic changed all that? Now that we can choose from a series of pastiches before (and after) taking a shot, it seems as though the future might increasingly lose the one aspect that has enabled us to mark it out as the future. No wonder the future won't feel futuristic, as we'll all be trying to make it feel like the past.