I really liked this idea of how science-fiction and science are a feedback loop of each other. It is pretty fascinating how science-fiction movies pull from real science and technology that is around at the time of the movie's production, but they take it and stretch it to this almost ridiculous seeming idea of what technology will be. When you watch old futuristic movies, you laugh at what they thought the future would look like. But, if you really look closely, a lot of the technology they use has become our reality. A lot of the time, science and technology draw their ideas for advancing from these type of movies. Often, the costumes are what makes it seem silly as they are often wildly inaccurate. I feel this makes us tend to gloss over technology that has come true because we are so use to seeing those technologies on a day to day basis, we forget how weird it was for them to be using that same technology before it was ever made.
I wanted to pull out instances in old movies we are all familiar with and place it side by side the technology that exists today that they were forward thinking on to make this feedback loop blatantly obvious. I cut clips from Star Trek, 2001 Space Odyssey and the Jetsons. I compared them to commercials of the technology they used that are our reality today. For example, I played a clip of a character from Star Trek using a touch screen pads and played it in time with a commercial for the iPad. I made two separate videos; one of all of the clips from movies and one with clips of today's commercials or real life events. I played these movies in sync so each comparing clip played at the same time.
I overlaid one with a song I felt fit the exciting advancing technology theme. I included an audio clip of Neil Armstrong saying "That's one small step for man... one giant leap for mankind" because that is what each movie we create is. Its a tiny addition to our collective idea of the future, but together, they make up our future reality.
I projected the "video of the sci-fi" onto a glass ball filled with water mixed with a few drops of India ink. This was meant to represent a Crystal Ball predicting our future. My life performance piece was me rubbing the crystal ball, although my self-consciousness definitely took away from it. I think the live performance part of my piece was the least successful and definitely could use some more fine tuning. I projected The "video of reality" onto a wall behind the glass ball. The projector had a problem focusing on the two difference surfaces that were different distances away, so I had to choose which surface I wanted clarity on. Although this was more of a projector problem, I think it added to my theme. I chose to focus on the ball, so the large projection was more important. I liked this because I felt like what the Crystal Ball was telling us was clear, and from that we can see a glimpse of our future, though not clearly because all the pieces to influence it haven't come together yet.
Below I included a screen shot of what my Mad Mapper looked like as I was presenting as well as some images of the actual presentation.
Hope you enjoyed! :)
