Back to the Future. Or the perpetual future nostalgia

The emergence of stories about the world to come and about hypothetical futures must surely be symptomatic of times of crisis… In the same way, so is, perhaps, the tendency to look to the past with rose-tinted glasses on, eulogising the utopia’s ruins or archaeology. Through the broad idea of the future and the current interest in futurology, we can discern the potential of what is ‘possible’ or of imagined pasts as a focus for critical reflection. An interesting exercise, then, is to discuss the links that are being established between the past and the future as a phenomenon in, and of, itself that emerged strongly at the outset of the modern age. Today, these time tunnels once again cut through many phenomena, both in academia and society, as seen in artistic and media practices. In this edition of Artnodes, we will see how these futurologies are supported in certain artistic and social manifestations. We frequently come across products that, in their speculation about possible worlds, point to dystopic futures where the excesses of technoscience offer us a social order that is almost always subjected to new forms of authoritarianism and surrounded by the chaos of environmental disaster. Other times, the myth of triumphing over death and genetic manipulation emerges so as to pave the way for questions on ethical character.