The Past Futures of Howard Rheingold (1)
Originally published for paying Patreon members on 2018-03-09. Republished here after a 90-day patron-first period.
An artobiography
The Past Futures of Howard Rheingold:
A Retrospective of Art and Ideas Part 1 1964–1977
My art-making always has been a subconscious divination ritual that I’ve invoked in parallel with the rational techno-social forecasting I have done for fifty years. My undergraduate thesis at Reed College in 1964 was about using electronic technology to explore states of consciousness; in the 1970s I was a Martian anthropologist in the streets of San Francisco. Then I started writing books — Tools for Thought in 1985, projecting the future of personal computers and networks to 2000 and beyond; Virtual Reality, 1990 — about an era that is only really beginning now, in 2016; The Virtual Community, 1992 — setting the stage for the age of social media; Smart Mobs in 2002 forecast the Arab Spring and the texting revolution. Anyone can read what I wrote (key passages are printed out and displayed with my art) in 1985 about 2005, in 1990 about 2016, in 1992 about 2002, in 2002 about 2012.
Did I accurately describe the future, given today’s power of retrospect? Here’s my sense of the future, in black and white, over fifty years; judge for yourself.
Those books are the more rational, scholarly, documented part of what I’ve been doing. I don’t think these tangible manifestations of my attempts at foresight would exist without the part that most people have not seen, which I expose publicly for the first time at this show.
How did I develop a sense of the future, beyond straightforward journalistic and scholarly legwork? The intuitive aspect cannot be denied. Institute for the Future (which will exhibit my art work February-June 2017) knows well that there’s no algorithm or invariant recipe for assembling signals and trends into a coherent scenario of the future that turns out to be accurate. Something else besides research is going on with my forecasting of future social, psychological, cultural, political impacts of emerging technologies — a sense of how it all might fit together, what it might mean, what opportunities and pitfalls each new medium might present.
The wordless conversation with myself I’ve been conducting since age 16 in painted, shaped, constructed, and now programmed media — my art, from my shoes to my illuminated spiderwebs — is what has fed my sense of the shifting gestalt of new technologies, emerging media, and our psychosocial reactions to them.