What is retro-futurism? According to this copy/pasted Wikipedia entry :
Retro-futurism (adjective retro-futuristic or retro-future) is a trend in the creative arts showing the influence of depictions of the future produced prior to about 1960.Characterized by a blend of old-fashioned "retro" styles with futuristic technology, retro-futurism explores the themes of tension between past and future, and between the alienating and empowering effects of technology. Primarily reflected in artistic creations and modified technologies that realize the imagined artifacts of its parallel reality, retro-futurism has also manifested in the worlds of fashion, architecture, literature and film.Thanks to the magic of archiving and documentation-and one non-revolutionary technology called the Internet-we now can take a peek at what our ancestors thought our lives would be!
You see, in 1910, French artist Villemard produced a series of illustrations depicting what life might be like in the year 2000.
While you can see a wide range of the artist's predictions in this Flickr set, the above image, of an architect and his robotic construction crew, seemed worth highlighting in the context of this blog.
At first, my intial reaction to this image was this bizarre combo of ridiculousness and optimism but then again, when I was a kid, I dreamt of year 2000 as the time when all of us would own his/her very own jetpacks and travel in flying cars.
Hope and optimisms, those are what keep us alive, ladies and gents.
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