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Studio 14: Futures Past and Present

Matthew Wraith

Cultural history from high art to kitsch is littered with visions of the future; some inspiring, some ridiculous, almost all of them wrong. From the spandex and flashing lights of 70s science fiction, to the monumental futurist tower-blocks of soviet-era Eastern Europe – nothing ever looks as dated as a vision of the future. Such visions always tell us as much about the present it was made in as the future itself.

But however absurd past predictions can sometimes seem in hindsight, we can’t simply shirk the task of trying to visualise the future. Creating workable models of the future is and will always be an urgent imperative. It is a job in which visual practitioners, artists, illustrators, designers, architects and town-planners, visual communicators, will inevitably play a vital part. It is not good enough to make statements or proposals for the future. It has to be pictured. 

In some ways, looking closely at the naïve utopian fantasies or wild dystopian panics of the past can make us better in our task of preparing for the future. Studying the futures of the past can help us better understand exactly how predictions are made, what blind-spots they can exhibit. It can help us tune our predictive mechanisms.

This studio looks backwards in order to look forwards. It is for students who wish to ready themselves for a rapidly changing technological, urban and political environment and are curious about how the study of cultural history can help us do this.

Keywords: The prediction business. Futures Past and Present / Cities and Homes / Human Bodies and Posthuman body / Order and Anarchy: The Politics of the Future / Apocalypse

Studio bibliography

  • Heimann, J., (2002) Future Perfect, Cologne: Taschen  
  • Dunne, A, and Rabie, F., Speculative Everything
  • Dobraszczyk, P., Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination, London: Reaktion
  • Batty, Michael. Inventing Future Cities. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2018.
  • Dunn, Nick and Cureton, Paul (2020) Future Cities: A Visual Guide. Bloomsbury, London
  • Bostrom, Nick. ‘In Defence of Posthuman Dignity.’ Bioethics 19.3 (2005): 202–214.
  • Haraway, D., 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the D. Haraway, ed., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, New York: Routledge, pp.149-181.
  • Lanier, Jaron. Who Owns the Future? London: Allen Lane, 2013.
  • Susskind, Jamie. Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
  • Kurzweil R., The Singularity is Near New York: Viking

Image: Magic Highway, Walt Disney, 1958. Banner: Hans Op de Beeck, Staging Silence (3), video still (detail), 2019

Matthew Wraith – Visualising the Future

Details

Tutor Matthew Wraith

Dissertation Studios 2022–23

 
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Installation view The History of My Pleasure, Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago). Collage of photographs on fabric on wall dividers.

Studio 01: The Pensive Image

Aikaterini Gegisian

Do images in the information age displace texts and become the main vehicle for expressing thought? How do images communicate? What are they are saying? Can images write histories?

Studio 02: Sport and Aesthetics

Ajay Hothi

Dissertation Studio 02 will examine the concept of aesthetics as applied within that most everyday activity: sport.
A painting by Wangechi Mutu, showing a mythical creature in a pink landscape embracing a white snake-like animal

Studio 03: The Bone Pile. Archive and Myth as Methodology

Ania Dabrowska

Starting with the archive as a ‘commons of imagination,’ Studio 03 is testing the bonds between the personal and the collective, the interconnection of heterogeneous histories, archival temporalities and deep places of myth and storytelling.
Tents in front of St Paul's during the Occupy Movement 2012

Studio 04: Public Protest – Spaces of negotiation

Carl Fraser

How do we shape the city? How do we claim, occupy and inform spaces as people who live, work and play? All places have a history of negotiation over territory and its use – which helps to bring them into their current form. Understanding this legacy through acts of dissent and protest can better uniform us about the places that we inhabit.
Anonymous stencil of a quotation from a letter from Leopold 1 of Belgium to his niece, Queen Victoria

Studio 05: “If I stay silent nothing will change:” Identity, Politics, Social Change and Creative Culture(s)

Christina Paine

This cross-disciplinary studio considers how power, culture, politics, identity, representation, activism, social media and mass culture theory intersect with a range of arts practices, including photography, architecture, design and fine art, film studies, fashion and music, sound, pop art and theatre.
A misty view across the tops of trees to further forested hills on the horizon. In the middle distance a series of large structures rise from amongst the trees. Their surfaces are decayed and their windows are broken. The structures include wide buildings of 1 to 3 storeys and a tall tower, they are topped by large white domes which are also broken and decayed.

Studio 06: Thinking with Ruins

Danielle Hewitt

Thinking With Ruins begins with the idea that to think about ruination allows us to approach subjects that are of interest materially, aesthetically and politically and it allows us to work across scales – from dust to debris to object to landscape.
Sculpture of a woman with writing on her skirt

Studio 07: Feminist Approaches

Edwina Attlee

In this studio you will be invited to take a feminist approach to your dissertation and its topic, whatever that topic might be.
Unknown black man with cigarette, white shirt, in front of a poster, Kingston Jamaica, circa 1950

Studio 08: Fashioning the African Diaspora

Elli Michaela Young

Exploring the fashioning of the African diaspora and with a particular focus on the Caribbean Island of Jamaica, this studio aims to think through how fashion and dress is used to grapple with ideas of self.
Etching by Hogarth showing a grotesque family scene

Studio 09: Sartorial Culture

Elisabeth Gernerd

This studio examines the intersections and relationships between objects and their visual and discursive representations through the lens of the history of fashion and dress. It locates fashion, or fashionable dress, in the conversations about it, the images portraying it, and the artefacts left in its wake.

Tent on the shore of a Scottish Loch

Studio 10: “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology”

James Payne

Studio 10 questions the role of technology in our lives and investigates the environmental ethics concerning how we relate to, and operate within the world and each other.
A choir walking through seaside town carrying colour and plants

Studio 11: The Hammer without a Master

Joseph Kohlmaier

Studio 11 explores the idea that we think, remember and decide ‘in the world,’ rather than in our heads, that we are connected in unexpected ways and that this connection may be a key to unravelling some of the paradoxes of modern life and culture.
Objects suspended and floating

Studio 12: The Voice of Things

Lesley Stevenson

This studio will offer a challenge to the idea that objects are unruly things and need to be brought to heel by labelling, categorising, taxonomising. Instead, it offers an invitation to give voice to the mute and invisible, by listening to objects and treating them as allies.
Boy 'sucking it up'

Studio 13: Suck it up

Matilda Moors

This studio takes a sideways looks at the intersection of youth culture and late capitalism considering the impacts and influences of desire, the cartoon, consumerism and cuteness in shaping our lived contemporary experience.
A glass bubble somewhere in outer space, future living

Studio 14: Futures Past and Present

Matthew Wraith

Cultural history, from high art to kitsch, is littered with visions of the future; some inspiring, some ridiculous, almost all of them wrong.
Image of a river, rocks, plants

Studio 15: A River with Standing

Mercedes Vicente

What happens when a river is conceived as a living entity instead of the prevailing perspective of human sovereignty over nature? What political impact may this unprecedented legal status have on the ecological crisis? What do Indigenous cosmologies contribute to current posthuman philosophical debates?

A view from a driving car window, tower blocks, trees

Studio 16: “I can’t see the wood for the trees:” Ecology as Methodology

Nicholas Temple

This studio aims to provoke discussion about the ’reality’ and the ‘myth’ of ecology: the ease with which one can theorise about it, and at the same time the persistent challenges of enacting it as an everyday lived condition of human (and more-than-human) existence.

Studio 17: The Practice of Space – Writing Atmospheres in Art and Architecture

Nico de Oliveira

Dissertation Studio 06 looks at space as practice, since each location is a mutable entity framed as a moment in time, populated by individuals and shaped by their actions as artists, musicians, curators, designers, architects, writers and spectators.
Hand drawing with chalk on rocks

Studio 18: The Poetics of Making

Paul Harper

This studio will consider the value of making in itself, independent of the product or outcome, exploring the idea of craft as meaningful work.
A view through concrete pipes, sun, sand

Studio 19: The Erotics of Infrastructure

Rachal Bradley

Studio 19 questions how our body and subjectivity is formed through our encounters with infrastructure. We will explore what constitutes contemporary infrastructure, such as the digital sphere, financial products and how these may impact the formation of our subjectivity and social organisation.

Code of Hammourabi, Stele, Musée du Louvre

Studio 20: A History of Efficiency

Trevor Norris

There is nothing inevitable about the way we organise our societies. Changing the harmful structures of economic efficiency, which are making the planet uninhabitable, is up to us. This studio is for students who are interested in exploring any aspect of the climate emergency.