Yesterday I saw the new movie “9″ where awesome talents of animators and voice artists once again have created a dystopia. I confess to being a literary and movie wimp when it comes to appreciating art as the depiction of death, destruction, horror, and the rest. I know this is unsophisticated in the arts.
Yet clearly, dystopian illustration of the future is becoming a bit old fashioned. Exploding cities, out-of-control machines, and horribly visualized aliens are all very twentieth century.
The future that is now unfolding does not seem fraught with those kinds of horrors. In the 1950s, when I was in high school, they seemed very possible. That is when dystopia acquired its cachet. But we know more now, and times have changed. The odds I give for a real dystopia in the 21st century are at least 9 to 1 against it. I know, global warming is in those odds somewhere. Yet as I wrote in my post Ditching Dystopia: No dystopia is necessarily ahead, quite the opposite is proving to be true.
So, I entertained myself this morning by overlaying the “9″ poster on a photo of some pansy flowers I took last month in Colorado. Next I erased some background from the poster. Then I replaced 9’s light globe with a shining Earth globe (a visual pun like Picasso enjoyed).
Quite seriously, it is time to use creativity and insight to describe and capture the global enlightenment that is dawning through our digital connected age. Looking forward with optimism is overdue and I am hopeful that soon the awesome tools and talent of our artists are challenged to show us the light and flowering of the future.
