Roll Up Roll Up - Science!

I've started exploring the showmanship of American Victorian era science and how it was both portrayed as and understood as a form of magic. I find it really interesting to see how a past culture responds to things that we today don't even notice as staples of society like television and the Internet. If one of us went back in time and pulled an iPhone out we would more than likely be thrown off a cliff on charges of witchcraft. I want to explore this idea of how ideas become conventional or unconventional depending on what time period they arise in, so I think for my postcards I'm going to focus on what an advert for a piece of modern technology that Tesla predicted would look like if he had had the means to actually realise his visions (his tele-visions, heh). 


The hyperbolic language and show-offy text is what really appeals to me in these posters, as I just find it sort of amusing that whatever these shows are they're almost definitely not the "greatest show on earth", but the showmanship and confidence of their arrangement and composition keeps your attention and even now I think makes you believe for a split second that you might actually gasp in amazement at a zebra in a cage or something "magnificent" like that. The main reason I'm interested in that idea is because of the generational difference and advancement between today's audience and those of the past is the only thing that separates us. We still go and watch massive IMAX films and jump in our seats and 'marvel' at shite on Britain's Got Talent, just as people back then would've done the same, except they'd have been in a strawberry field watching a clockwork monkey do awkward backflips. The response is the same though, and people are the same, we all still want to be amazed, it just takes a lot more to get us there now. Tesla seemed to understand this intrinsic craving for faster and better that the human race has always harboured, as his ideas concerning things like mobile phones and wireless energy illustrate. 

These are a few ideas I started to experiment with in the vein of the circus and carnival science shows. I think this brief lends itself well to this sort of approach as the posters and postcards are actual formats that artwork like this would've been presented on at the time. I want to make a modern interpretation of the flair of these traditional posters.