Today I was looking for an interesting piece of science fiction art work to use as my wallpaper and I noticed a couple of things.
The first things that came up were recent digital pieces. They were all done in a landscape format and they were generally dark with grey, dirty blues and black the predominant colours. Quite a few of them had very detailed images and most of them were of a pretty high standard of ability although they were mostly uninspiring.
At the top of the Google Images page there was a link to 70's Sci-Fi art. I clicked on that.
Now here's what I noticed. They were almost all in a portrait format and there was colour. Lots of colour. And the artistic standard was high in all cases.
I assume this change in format is because the '70's art was made, in the main, for book covers and posters where as the recent stuff was made for computer. Some of the older stuff was square and I recognized some album covers. I found that interesting.
However the difference in colour palettes was disturbing.
It made me think about why we, as a collective, tend to see the future as bleak whereas once we saw it as something extraordinary and wondrous. The future use to be something to look forward to. It use to inspire and drive people to try and achieve greatness in order to bring to all, the fantastic things the future offered.
In the 60's and 70's the 2000's were the future and it looked bright. It looked special. But now that that future is the present it isn't bright and, in many, many ways it's horrible.
As I write this piece and prepare to send it into the ether to post it online I believe that it's the internet that has caused a lot of this blight on our, once bright present. Instead of projecting light and joy and goodness it has done opposite and has attracted the bad the nasty and the dark. In all of the science fiction of the past, the internet was not a factor. Computers were always present but they were tools. They didn't govern people or determine society. They didn't threaten.
It's a shame the future turned dark. Maybe it's time that we switched the lights back on.
P.S. I found a nice image - Done in landscape for a pc (but it took me a while).
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