For the final designs for my postcards I kept with the idea of late 19th century showmanship concerning scientific discovery and accomplishment. Unlike my poster where I focused on Tesla's predictions that aren't a reality, I chose to visualise the things that Tesla actually correctly foresaw.
As humour is usually an element I enjoy playing with in my work I thought that expressing these normal modern ideas as great wonders of the future would be interesting. Every generation always assumes it is at the peak of human development (which is why a hundred years ago everyone thought everything the human race would ever need had already been invented), so I wanted to look outside this frame of thinking, as Tesla did, and appreciate that we are somewhat arrogant for thinking that we in the here and now know best when we have no idea what the future holds. Also I think it's just funny to see hyperbolic advertisements for things that we all take for granted and often don't even notice, but are instrumental to our progression as people, like moving image and the Internet.
To keep with the theme of these postcards being advertisements, I kept the Tesla logo consistent across all three postcards. I also wanted to visualise Tesla himself as a ringmaster, as that's how a lot of people perceived him in his time, as he was suggesting ideas that sound normal to us but sounded ridiculous then. When asked about his strange predictions and comparison to other more profitable scientists such as Edison, he was quoted as saying "The present is theirs, the future is mine.". While he never really got any personal reward or recognition in his life for his contribution to science and his technological predictions, he was right about most of the things he said and his ideas of wireless energy, a cloud of data storage that spans the globe, and portable devices that would allow us to converse with anyone anywhere at any time have become a staple of our society. The aim of my postcards is to appreciate the distance between his audience in life and his audience now, and how what one generation dismisses as impossible, a future one will eventually dismiss as taken for granted.



No comments:
Post a Comment