The Future is Vintage

Excerpts:

• Natural Born Cyborgs, Andy Clark
• How We Became Post-Human, Katherine Hayles
• Her, Spike Jonze
• HYPER-REALITY, Keiichi Matsuda

The Future is Already Past

In discussion, our professor Craig Protzel said in the 7 years of the IMA/Low Res program, it's the first time a full class agreed that the future as depicted in the movie Her and the short art film HYPER-REALITY is one that we're currently experiencing. Our lives are increasingly intertiwned with artifically intelligent "agents," and the way we interact with the physical environment of our communities is increasingly mediated by highly personalized hyper-consumerist digital billboards. In 1948, William Gibson wrote "the future is already here." In 1955 a short film titled "The Future is Here" was realesed. And in 2026, two weeks after we discussed this topic in class, artist Shu Lea Cheang in a conversation with Kira Xonorika at Leslie Lohman said "the future is vintage."

We appear to be living near the culmination of the cybernetic future first envisioned in midcentury 20th century. Other than uploading entire consciousness into disembodied mechanical devices or moving around our cities with robotic bodymods as seen in Cyberpunk 2077, there's not much of a future to imagine in the collective American psyche (other than a post-capitalist feaudal hellscape). And even the few remaining future predictions, including the so called "singularity" feel like futures as distant as colonizing mars ever was when we first landed on the moon. I wonder if the end of age of computers is as near today as the end of the space age was in 1969. Not at all and yet...

Regardless of whether the exagerated depiction of our addiction to social media in HYPER-REALITY becomes more real or not. Regardless of whether Apple's upcoming camera-equipped airpods will usher in a decade of Her-like AI OSes, I'm in all honesty a little bored by the cyborg question. What comes now that we have been post-human? What comes now that we have been trans-human?

I want us to be less concerned with our individual humanity. Perhaps the future will be be less about being post- or trans- human. Perhaps it'll be less about the cybernetic relationships of control that govern how we communicate and relate. We've been so concerned with asking ourselves what it means to be human. But what if what it means to be a person is not unlike what it is to be a flattened rock tricked into thinking by putting lightning inside it? What if this historical moment proves to be anticlimactic in the way that we still all just live in a world filled with both the beauty of love and terror of genocidal war? Then maybe we should just ask what kind of gardens we want to make with our cyborg neighbors.