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The nature of yearning is urgent so as to guarantee evolution, change. -Darryl Calkins

“We are the knights of a future realm.”

I’ve been wading through the libraries of the mind trying to grapple with the relationship of art and it’s prophetic nature. There appears to be a correlation that art has a predilection to predict the future of culture. It also tends to have gravitational pull on innovation.

Think about the science fiction in the last 100 years; its quite impressive how the imagination has created some of the future.

Some examples that come to mind (If I remember right there is a point in the book How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley he had similar examples to make other points.)

• Flip phones: Used in Star Trek in 1966
• Autonomous cars: Issac Asimov about self driving cars back in 1964
• Drones: Or the “hunter seekers” of the 1965 novel Dune
• Smart Watches: A character of the 1st half of the 20th century, “Dick Tracy” and his two way radio watch which showed up in 1963

There is this interesting quotation by Jim Hill in an article “My Plexiglas and Light Sculptures” as I was digging to find other early computer art.

It reads like this:

The artist serves society as a teacher of certain aspects of the present. Marshall McLuhan explains this future as follow: “The power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments, by a generation and more has long been recognized … Art acts as radar acts as “an early alarm system” … This concept of the arts as prophetics, contrasts with the popular idea of them as mere self-expression. McLuhan describes the artist’s function as one which presents current social and technological changes to society. The visual artist makes objects which are of abstractions of selected portions of the present social environment. - Leonardo, Vol 3 pp.9-17 1970

I’ll leave it at that because I need to think through this more myself. But one has to ponder the questions:

• if art is prophetic, how does it emerge? Does art have a sentient nature driven by the collective of artistic pursuit?
• One might suggest the artist, or the collective of artist are the who drives the social conscience, does that affect how or why or what we create?
• Is the synthesis of art and its output what drives future new ideas / new innovations? If so, what responsibilities do we have to it?

Naturally these questions are a bit more philosophical in nature, but I think there is something interesting to query in that thread of thought.

Mind you, I am sure there has been thought and probably much written around this as well. But it is the brush strokes of thought that drive new ideas.

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!