ECHOES OF THE ATOMIC AGE
BEZ,
12/05/2016
Text by Marta Molina, journalist and curator of the exhibition Echoes of the Atomic Age.
Then, as now, the imperfect future was more than just the wrong version of a verb tense. Grammar surpassed the concept and tomorrow began to be seen with concern. These were times of the Cold War and the atomic nuclear threat, but the propaganda of a brave new world worked hard to deny those feared imperfections on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
More than six decades later, who can find the seven differences? Barack Obama is leaving. Donald Trump arrives. And behind both of them is that cold setting of relations between the United States and Russia, which is in the background of his pictorial work. That pluperfect future that was drawn in an imperfect present, always overshadowed by threat, is as real today as yesterday. In any corner of the world someone could be about to press the red button. The human being is not aware of the primitive state in which he finds himself.
Perhaps this time that has passed since the Cold War until today has made us lose the naive optimism with which yesterday we looked at tomorrow. The experience of sixty years in which no one found that dreamed future, in which scientific advances were diverted towards ends other than human benefit.
Why this focus on the past future?
Nearly seven decades after the end of the atomic age, the threat of a nuclear holocaust remains alive. Terrorism, radioactive failures, secret arsenals and the continuous challenge of the two blocs that to this day desire to dominate the world. The art of producing in the enemy the fear of attacking, practiced with mastery on both sides of the curtain and which engendered that prodigious era to which we look with melancholy.
Now that the golden age of the future has been overcome, these paradoxes seem as current to me in 2017 as they are contemporary in 1965 when Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, declared that he felt like a destroyer of worlds. "We knew the world would not be the same," he said. "A few laughed, others cried and the majority remained silent", silence in the first test of a nuclear weapon (Trinity, 1945).
The atomic bomb, the Ford Nucleon, the Thunderbirds series, the atomic pen of 2011: A Space Odyssey, but also the washing machine, the dryer, the credit cards and the vacuum cleaners of an automated world, robotization and self-service. Does it look familiar?
Moshe Vardi, professor of Computer Science at Rice University, assures that in the next 30 years machines will eliminate 50% of jobs, a recurring speculation in times of crisis and on which the most ominous images are projected in a kind of science fiction exercise.
Cold War, revisited
More than sixty years since the beginning of the Cold War, the United States and Russia have lowered the tone of the confrontation but continue to fight. The roar of the two great powers reverberates in the present in seemingly distant conflicts, wielded by seasoned hackers, members of a cybernetic squad.
"The global economy is on the cusp of a dramatic growth spurt driven by intelligent machines that will take full advantage of advances in computer processing, artificial intelligence, networked communication, and the digitalization of almost everything," Erik wrote. Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee in The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (Norton, 2014).
A city run by a computer, men who live with androids who dream of sheep, permanently happy people, tin police, reproductive technology, valid and invalid beings, a virtual world... A world in which the machine will occupy more and more space and, when the day comes, robots will do all the work until the complete automation of planet Earth. Artificial intelligence, like any new disruptive human invention, will involve many radical changes in our way of understanding progress.
Many decades after the first reign of the machines, those wonderful years are back in the news. The fashion of pin-ups, local rockers, the naïve, the well-intentioned and the pop work to counteract the post-Great Recession discouragement. The era of pessimism is inaugurated: Trump is coming!
Bread and Circus
Cinema, photography, illustration and propaganda covered up the evils of that consumer society of the fifties and sixties, wrapped in a festive halo and an aesthetic that in those decades expressed the buoyant industrial development and the new American lifestyle. a breath of well-being after the Great Depression and World War II. Social networks, hyperconnectivity, cheap consumption and an overabundance of information alleviate today's ills. A present rocked by the dead calm of an undeclared war and an obsessive competition for security, with Daesh terrorists and their dramatic entrances on the scene, out of script.
I like to look at progress through the magnifying glass of ethics. Science and morality are for me two inseparable concepts. This is where my genesis comes from, my inspiration in that future that never came, retrofuturism and the golden moment of research in the 1950s and 1960s, an attractive universe of truncated perspectives. The fascination with scientific progress, the confidence that it would be able to solve any problem. A falsely futuristic landscape but one that flew over the desires of a few generations.
For centuries, experts have predicted that machines will retire workers, that they will be an obsolete piece of the past, but that a post-work era will come, in which if we take the right steps, man will enjoy a more creative life. and happy.
Zigmunt Bauman dies this Monday the 9th. The Polish sociologist's theories were a paradigm of that retrofuturism desired today. "The great changes in history never came from the solemn poor," he said, "but from the frustration of people with great expectations that never came." Bauman also studied the future that never existed.
Children today no longer want to be astronauts, children want to be soccer players. Almost seven decades after propaganda and the American way of life, citizens look to the future with the lack of optimism of the current times, job instability and economic uncertainty. The Great Recession has burned the term dystopia into our vocabulary, an antonym of that word that made the future close and the dreamed possible.