Hello and welcome back picsandportraits. Welcome back to the Futuretoons.
For those unfamiliar with Futuretoons, this is where we explore the intersection
of retrofuturism and animation by looking at past depictions of the future seen in cartoons.
Today we will be heading back to the future of the 1990s, and early 2000s,
with a look at early computer animated futures.
This is a sort of crossover I guess with our brief history of computer animation.
We are not going to be totally exhaustive here. Things we’ve covered things like
Reboot and Brilliance before, so we will leaning a little more towards the obscure.
Absolutely, this is my jam. Very excited to get into this.
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With that plug out of the way, let’s head back to the future.
There was a time in my childhood when CGI was the future.
This idea was not lost on those early computer animation pioneers as when you look back on older
CGI, even before my time, you see a lot of flying cars, space ships, futuristic, sci-fi cities.
Granted, this is up for interpretation. A
lot of these early CGI shorts are a camera flying through shapes really.
Animation on its own has always taken a lot to produce, both in terms of financial
cost and also in the time required to make it. Computer generated animation was no different.
We talked about this in our history of CGI,
but the people responsible for these animations were also working with very limited technology.
That’s why so much early CGI was abstract. It was impossible to make
a realistic person so why not use the tech to express something else, something new.
Programs like the Mind’s Eye, which is what you’ve been seeing here,
were compilations or collections of these short pieces of computer animation, stitched together.
Very weird. Very surreal stuff, usually paired with some kind of electronic music.
They were a lot like music videos or a series or block of music videos,
sometimes fading in and out of each other like a mix.
Now maybe I’m showing my age here, but to me,
there will always be something futuristic about this aesthetic.
For the most part, these were just that, an aesthetic or a vibe.
Again, they were abstract, with not much in the way of an explicit story,
though they often explored ideas like space and humans relationship with technology.
Cyberspace, a virtual world you could jack into. Cyber,
virtual, these are staples of 1990s futurism.
With the huge advancements in communication technologies, like the internet. Suddenly,
we were connecting with each other instantly, all around, at the click of a button.
If you wanted to, you could step outside yourself and assume an online persona, choose
your identity, and these ideas, I think at least, inspired a lot of what you are going to be seeing.
So yeah, we’ve got this great selection of early CGI futures here.
For the last little bit you’ve been seeing stuff from Cyperscape, which was a lot like Mind’s Eye,
only from one artist, Beny Tchaicovsky, with music by Peter Bernstein, who ‘70s or ‘80s kids
may recognise from the made for TV Star Wars movie, The Ewok Adventure, Caravan of Courage.
There are also a lot of rave tracks, which compliment the visuals well.
This was released in 1997, but some of the animations that appeared here were
also featured in Mind’s Eye a few years earlier,
so it’s safe to say these were likely produced sometime in the early ‘90s.
Cyberscape brings us to various virtual worlds with different kinds of futuristic
designs. Some are pretty standard space stations while others blend nature,
water, trees, in a more I guess spiritual way.
It’s an abstract film, or a series of abstract films, with recurring themes of consumerism,
capitalism. This George Jetson like treadmill here with a person chasing money.
TV sets as faces seem to be Tchaicovsky’s gimmick. We see different variations on this idea. Also,
robots, which remind me a lot of The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Not much in the way of predictions to unpack here,
but there are plenty of metaphysical ideas at play here. What is means to be human. Or not.
Up next we have Alex Orrelle’s FREEWARE from 2001.
Kind of a darker future, I guess depending on your interpretation of Cyberscape.
Freeware takes place in a cyberpunk dystopian corporatocracy, a world ran
by Corp Technologies, a corporation that literally acquires countries.
We are introduced to Maia, an AI program who is enslaved by Corp.
Freeware is only seven minutes long but it manages to cram in
quite a bit story. Unlike what we’ve already looked at, there is a plot,
which finds a group of outlaws attempting to rescue Maia from Corp.
Standard cyberpunk stuff here. Monolithic corporation, robot suits, some slightly altered
vehicle designs. You can also download AI programs into your body. Very anime.
Speaking of AI programs, the last piece I’d like to look at features a panel of them,
The Turing Test, also from 2001.
This was created by Mark Sagar using LifeFX,
which I believe was an algorithm programmed b y Sagar, and is a very interesting experiment.
It features three digital actors on a game show, Turing Test, after the
Turing test, a way of testing a machine’s intelligence compared to that of a human.
Here, framed like a game show where if the contestants win,
their social status will be upgraded to human.
We have a virtual therapist, a chess program that beat a human chess master,
and an algorithm that has been fed quotes from sci fi movies.
Really interesting idea here, especially for the time. These
digital actors responded in real time to commands for their personalities
and responses, so they were actually interacting to the host’s questions.
Considering how advanced algorithms are now,
this is pretty quaint, but definitely ahead of its time.
So yeah, even if these don’t explicitly take place in a specific year or future,
I think given their aesthetics or philosophies, you can file these under CGI futures,
along with and the very smutty Dark Justice, which we’ve covered on the show before.
If you haven’t, I’d recommend going back and watching some of the other
episodes. Plenty of interesting futures there.
I will post links to everything covered here today in the description. Let me know what you think.
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As always, thank you so much for your interest in this channel and thanks for watching.
See you in the future.