French art from 1910 depicting the year 2000
The Bibliothèque nationale de France has a wonderful gallery of illustrations by Villemard from 1910 imagining what life would be like in the year 2000. It's part of a larger exhibition titled Utopia: The Quest for the Ideal Society in the Western World. BB's Paris liaison, Alex Boucherot, editor of Fluctuat, kindly provided a rough translation of the Villemard gallery description:
Visions of The Year 2000Link (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)
These labels, most probably intended to be found in food products, were presented on panels of a dozen little scenes. They illustrate the way our grandparents imagined the year 2000. The inventions meant to improve everyday life are seen side by side with more erudite or searchful vocations, but curiously the clothing fashion remains that of the Belle Epoque!
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That picture DOES accurately predict some jackass talking on his phone during the picture show.
Interesting how many of the things they imagine to have become automated, such as grooming (barber, and a woman "putting her face on", are things many of us would never consider nor allow a robot to do, preferring rather a real human.
Hahahahah! Totally!
Very nice pictures. All this again goes to show that people are much more accurate when it comes to predicting technological change than social change.
The most interesting thing to me is how all the wiring for these devices is exposed. We do our best to hide it, but the mindset back then still saw it as super-interesting, I guess...
Apparently, while everyone's lives would change in 90 years, their clothes wouldn't.
Oh, and I just noticed... despite everything being electronically controlled, there are always people to work the machine. I wonder when the idea of automated machines not requiring humans arose?
At least they didn't predict that we'd be wearing unitards or jumpsuits in the future.
Completely inaccurate.
It should read "En L'an 2500."
I looked at the lithograph showing a school in the year 2000. It shows children hooked to electrodes while the teacher feeds textbooks into a grinder powered by a hand crank moved by a student. Ironically, this is exactly what our reading instruction has turned into, with the passage of No Child Left Behind.
Many of these images are reproduced in "Futuredays: A Nineteeth Century Vision of the Year 2000," by Isaac Asimov (published 1986).
In that book, the artist is identified as Jean Marc Côté, "a French commercial artist," and the images are said to date from 1899, when they were commissioned to be made into "a set of cigarette cards" for distribution during the 1900 fin-de-siècle festivities. The company that commissioned the cards went out of business before they could be distributed. One set of cards survived, and Asimov's book reproduced fifty of them.
Many of these images, in particular those of the helmeted figures and sky mobiles seem to have inspired the art department in Truffaut's movie Fahrenheit 451.
This one:
http://expositions.bnf.fr/utopie/grand/3_95a5.htm
reminds me of:
http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF197-Automatic_Business.jpg#183
and makes me smile.
Love the image of everyone on motorized roller skates. The machine scrubbing the bathtub while madame is receiving her maquillage would be a nice addition to my household as well.
Maybe by now the belle époque fashions were supposed to have gone out of style and come back in.
Right, it shows that electricity and flying were the hot new things. But what's amazing is that this collection has so much prior art, possibly nullifying quite a few stupid patents out there. :)
I mean there's the ideas of listening to your news paper (podcasting), visual and auditory communication (video conferencing), sending of audio messages (voice mail, IM), radeon heating (nuclear energy?), electric roller skates (segway?), and of course CSL (computer supported learning). Not to mention the wacky automated tailor, barber shop and construction yard (second life, anyone?).
Maybe they can borrow some theme music from Conan O' Brian?
http://www.nbc.com/nbc/Late_Night_with_Conan_O'Brien/intheyear2000/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jDU8zAsjqk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUwDdc52udI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZBYFljumWQ
"In the year 2000......"
Glaurung_quena, thanks for that additional background on these. I wonder if the museum was aware of their history?
The translation for the text on that page is as follows:
These stamps, probably meant to acompany foodstuffs, are shown 12 to a sketch. They show how our grand parents imagined the year 2000! The inventions destined to improve daily life go hand in hand with those more destined for more intelligent or exploratory purposes(rough), curiously the clothing styles stay the same as they were back in the day!
This one is the best in my opinion; not only did they foresee teleconferencing and electric trains, but also Mad Max!
On Paleo-Future, they have a set of postcards produced by Hildebrands, a German Chocolate Company, showing visions of 2000 from circa 1900.
http://paleo-future.blogspot.com/2007/04/postcards-showing-year-2000-circa-1900.html
I used to have a postcard book of postcards that showed visions of 2000 from the 1900s... was sold circa 2000... I bet they still have copies available somewhere...
I think these images could be the basis for a pretty cool videogame of some kind. Riding around some kind of retro-futuristic steampunk world, shooting people from your armoured motorcycle.
Several of those images contain absolutely nothing mechanical or futuristic whatsoever. Are we to believe the year 2000 will an endless string of mandatory fantastic dinner parties in mansions??
Sounds rather nice actually.
>That picture DOES accurately predict some >jackass talking on his phone during the picture >show.
It's not a picture show, it's a webcam surely??