thing of the past | thing to come
What: Wired magazine's end-of-book Found page, featuring a heavily Photoshopped photo of an artifact from the future. Here is May 2007's "Fido Fusion," clearly the best way to procure a dog. I mean, who wouldn't want a dorkie?Why: Wired's editors figured out Photoshop before anyone else. They realized that it could not only make things prettier, but also that it could make things. So each issue, they concoct an intricate vision in their virtual workshop. Look at the slides from this 2013 Happy Meal. The burger is vat-grown Kobe beef. The box has a mini-fryer, a disposable iPod, and a diabetes warning. The Coke has a tunable flavor infusion system and a free sample of Flintstones Ritalin. Welcome to the future.
Impact: The artifacts take our measure like nothing else on earth. Walking a laser beam between winsome and terrifying, the pieces are masterworks of plausible deniability—plausible, because they could happen, and deniable, because, ha ha, I mean seriously, we're not going to let it go that far, are we? Well, are we?
Personal Connection: My phone rings a lot. When Wired's Chris Baker called early last year and asked if Lone Shark could help them and producer J.J. Abrams transform the May 2009 issue into a festival of puzzles and mysteries, we said yes. Then Wired's Nick Thompson asked if we could build a manhunt to chase reporter Evan Ratliff across the country, and we said yes to that too. We've been saying yes a lot to Wired; on one day this week, I worked on four different Wired projects, including the mind-exploding Repo Men hunt we did with Universal Pictures on wired.com. Sadly, I haven't yet gotten a chance to envision an artifact, but I hope to eventually. After all, the future is soon.
Other Contenders: Martin Gardner's long-running column on mathemagical distractions in Scientific American; Harper's Index, a logical way of looking at a world which defies logic; Games' influential fake ads, a trick which I've copied more times than I can count; Highlights' coolly moralistic Goofus & Gallant, the adventures of two boys who could not be more different; Mad's fold-in, a near-certain method of destroying your issue's resale value.
Profile
selinker- Mike Selinker
- Lone Shark Games
Page Summary
- selinker : [+0]
- gearhead69 : [+5]
- mckitterick : [+2]
- tahnan : [+2]
- princeofcairo : [+1]
- taylortails : [+1]
Comments
Edited at 2010-04-05 03:43 pm (UTC)
As you say, "The future is soon." Truer words never written.
On the subject of creepy future technology, anyone who has ever read anything by Philip K. Dick, or perhaps Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, or similar fiction authors of that general era knows that a lot of the technology that we regarded as highly advanced and somewhat shocking is closer today than we would ever have imagined it might be.
There's a YA fiction novel called "Feed" by M.T. Anderson that features a galactic web link to which ever living person is hooked up to 24/7 via a chip implanted in the brain of every child at birth. The implications are amazing and kind of freaky at the same time, but undoubtedly someone is working on that right now, and very likely there are people who would line up for it like it was the first iPod were it to be introduced.
Funny, thought-provoking, and kind of eerie, are these what-ifs.
However, I can claim credit for the Ocurity bionic-eye fake ad in the last Wired having the slogan "The future is in sight."
Edited at 2010-04-05 04:29 pm (UTC)
And, whatever job you have, I think I want it.
See, this feature is excellent science fiction: It not only speculates on a possible future, but asks the next question about that change and seeks second- and third-derivatives about if that change happens. Good stuff!
But from where I'm sitting, all the runners-up are better candidates for "most beautiful". I don't see the examples you gave as being all that visiony—if we've learned anything from watching 1960s movie depictions of the distant 1990s, it's that things don't really change as dramatically or predictably as we think. As for the Happy Meal itself, I find it kind of a mess of too many concepts at once. Compare that to Harper's Index and the fold-ins, both of which are heavily-imitated cultural touchstones. (It's hard to pick up a news magazine these days that, in its first ten pages, doesn't have a few facts presented in the form "NUMBER: description of the number".)
In fact, speaking of heavily-imitated, I wonder where the "back page" concept started. Nearly every magazine has one—not a literal back page, of course, that's stupidly true, but some one-page feature. For Time and Newsweek, it's a particular kind of column; for Mad, it's the fold-in; for my college's alumni magazine, it's a photo and description of odd artifacts from the library collections... There must be a traceable history of back-page innovation.