The Future: Bright to Dark
Arya Ameen
When I planned my creative project, I wanted to create a photo collage (going from “brighter” themes to “darker” themes) with a combination of my own drawings and some from the Internet based off of some of the readings/screenings we have had in our course over the past year. I wanted to hand-tear the clippings, making the rips more jagged and rough as the collage progressed to darker stories. However, with the unexpected crisis we are currently in the middle of, I didn’t have the time or resources to bring to life what I had intended with my creative project.
Thus, I came to a compromise with my computer, finding images online and placing them over a background art of Italian Futurism. I chose this specifically to be the background of my project because I feel like it is a good representation of our course: it manages to pull together ideas of the future with the ideas of the past and present, it can be dark and it can also be bright.
Furthermore, some of these ideas can be highly subjective. For example, I put Her on the very left, because even though the film presented us with a melancholic mood, it also celebrated the beauty of life and humanity and is a rare presentation of good-natured AI in film. From what we can see of The Jetsons and Star Trek, they both have optimistic, adventurous views of the future. Your Brain is a Time Machine celebrates the wonders of the ever-complicated human brain. Indigenous Origin Stories including the Raven and Turtle bring together humans and nature as equals, and show us how we must respect these spiritual beings. Of course, the Raven has some dark notes in the story as it is about theft and mischief, however it is still an origin story of mankind. Similarly, Prometheus and The Odyssey consist of similar themes of deceit and revenge, but they are considered “great” legends that have shaped the origins of Western culture, and have inspired several ancient cultures, which is why I put them closer to the left.
In the centre, I’ve put Ex Machina, Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, and some of Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The latter three have similar tones in my perspective: we see AI, a world that has changed, but we are not given too much information about the whole world itself to determine whether it is dystopic or utopic. The stories themselves are dark, presenting the cruel side of humans, so they are not nearer to the left. I feel similarly about Daedalus and Icarus, however I do feel it is darker and thus more towards the right as the whole story is about human morality and how it is so easily corrupted. Though Blade Runner is based off Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the novel gives us a better view of the world and thus it is definitely more dystopic. Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience shows us a world where people objectively seem content, however it also tarnishes and commercialises one of the world’s oldest and most spiritual cultures.
Finally, the far right: Metropolis, 1984, Modern Times, Dawn, Oval, Brave New World, Sleep Dealer, and Brazil. All of these stories, to me, present the dark side of humanity: how people conform to control, and how the controllers take full advantage until it leads to chaos. These stories come in various shapes and forms (alien sci-fi, comedy, fantasy) but they all present very similar themes.
