Over the years, a lot of outlandish predictions have been made about the future—hoverboards, time travel, holodecks, jetpacks, a global interconnected network. Some of them came true, some of them have yet to come true. But what happens to those fruitless predictions, those ideas that came and remain rudderless in the vacuum of possibility? Are the simply doomed to forever remain in the discarded scrapheap of “what if…”? Perhaps taking form in some other part of the multiverse? It’s a question pondered by a certain Robert Walker in this short film from Sascha Pohflepp called Forever Future, part of the MADE UP exhibition in Pasadena, California, which looks at Design’s Fictions, or the ideas that never quite made it. At least, not yet.Pohflepp explains:Robert Walker is a fictitious character who remembers the visions of space that dominated the American public imagination until well into the 1980s. He expected to follow the Voyager probes into the unknown and spend part of his life in space. Fifteen years ago, however, he realized that this future is unlikely to happen and he started a space program of his own. He collects technological predictions that had been made for the present year and conserves the ones that didn't come true. In an annual ritual, he visits a storage facility in which he keeps his 'ship,’ a semi-autonomous archive that will fly through time until it gets recovered and the mission ends.The film is a ponderous look at the transience of unrealized ideas, a reflection of the possibilities that are still possible, rather than actual. Here is a man caught between time, stuck trying to accomplish the thoughts of the past while living in the present.
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What Happens To Predictions About The Future That Don't Come True?
A short film by Sascha Pohflepp ponders the “what ifs…” of technology via a man trapped in the twilight zone between science fact and fiction.