Speculation — faith — hope
These are cultural artifacts created texts by students in the undergraduate Comparative Literature course Back to the Future, as well as by graduate students in the CLC course The Future. Both courses, taught by Professor Felipe Quetzalcoatl Quintanilla, invited the creators here included, to think about how the “the future” has been imagined in ancient texts and in ever more contemporary and global visions of “things to come”. The students thus came to consider canonical spiritual and philosophical texts that help us imagine “time” itself, as well as humanity’s place within the cosmos, as tinkerers, voyagers, exiles, builders of utopia, or destroyers of worlds.
Capitalism, consumerism, and futurism /// Primitivism and socialism/communism
By Saghar Ghezel
The first collage is intended to represent aspects of capitalism, consumerism, and futurism. This work is intended to draw on the potentially dystopian elements of a capitalist consumer society. The combination of Mark Zuckerberg’s headshot and the famous Orwellian quotation regarding mass government surveillance is in reference to recent controversies concerning Zuckerberg selling datas of Facebook users to advertisement companies.