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.
A Dystopia in Disguise
By Elsie Sheppard
The COVID-19 pandemic progressed faster than anyone anticipated. The world has begun to shut down during these devastating times. Borders closed, hospitals overwhelmed, struggling supply chains, and scared citizens are a result of governments’ drastic measures to flatten the Coronavirus curve.
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.
The Future: Bright to Dark
By 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.