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490875 2013

VCU12210.1177/1470412913490875Journal of Visual CultureCurtis

journal of visual culture

Tomorrow Barry Curtis

Abstract

This article explores the ramified meaning of the idea of ‘Tomorrow’ in the mid 1950s. It looks at a number of fictional and non fictional attempts to predict futures on the basis of extrapolating from the technological and cultural phenomena of the then present. With particular reference to the 1956 Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition, the author seeks to establish the parameters of conjecture as well as the timely cultural politics of the Independent Group. He suggests how writers and thinkers, such as Charles and Ray Eames and Norbert Wiener, combined with the filtering of information theory in contemporary science fiction to generate significant harbingers of digital culture in the formulations of the ‘Tomorrow’ of 1956. Keywords

apocalyptic • assemblage • Cold War • collage • communications • future • futurology • post-industrial • utopian

As a title for an exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’ is a provocation. Colin St John Wilson, who designed the exhibition guide, referred to the phrase as: ‘catchy but ludicrous’ (Wilson, 1988: 37). In an avant-garde tradition of extrapolating from emergent technologies and anticipating new sensibilities, the 38 participants who responded to Theo Crosby’s initiative proceeded, by means of ‘antagonistic co-operation’,1 to formulate some progressive scenarios. The aim was to demonstrate the harbingers of a latent future that were already present in seductive images transmitted from across the Atlantic. Earlier in the year, Peter Smithson, who with his partner Alison Smithson designed the 1981 ‘House of the Future’ for the Ideal Home Exhibition, said of his 25-year projection: ‘we found that (the) journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com] SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) Copyright © The Author(s), 2013. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav Vol 12(2): 279–291 DOI 10.1177/1470412913490875

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consensus of opinion among the experts we consulted was that the period is likely to produce as many revolutionary changes as the past 100 years’ (Smithson and Smithson, 2004: 40). In his essay ‘The Expendable Ikon 1’, John McHale, a collaborator on the eye-catching display of popular iconography of the ‘This is Tomorrow’ ‘Group 2’ exhibit, devoted a section to ‘Selling Tomorrow’ as a ‘complex atmosphere of adventure, speed and efficiency’ (McHale, 1959: 82). In 1956 there were abundant and dramatically varied ‘tomorrows’. Reyner Banham identified one version as ‘an essentially nineteenth century vision of the urban environment – densely built, overpopulated, low on privacy, violent, serviced by public transport’ (Sparke,1981:136); he referred in lectures to a ‘Standard Urban Future’ – present in the imaginatively impoverished futurism of the Buchanan Report and other Government initiatives. Banham pondered the contradictions inherent in the optimistic outcomes of current technologies and the hostile policies of Cold War confrontation that threatened to obliterate them. The synthetic futurological text ‘Towards 2000’ – which presented the distilled wisdom of the Hudson Institute – quotes President Kennedy’s monitory opening address to the General Assembly of the UN in September 1961 as follows: ‘Today every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable’ (Kahn and Wiener, 1967: 359). Subsequently, the authors speculate optimistically that in a ‘Postindustrial’ society, the average worker will have 218 days’ vacation, that disease will be defeated, sea beds cultivated and weather firmly controlled. Reyner Banham was particularly keen to rescue some of the most aggressively optimistic avant gardes of the early 20th century. The Futurist and Constructivists were mobilized as appropriate inspirations for an imagined future that incorporated the dynamic realms of advertising and popular entertainment into practices of montage and collage. Banham used his lectures and published work to expose the purist manoeuvres that had codified Modernism into a predictive linearity. The mood of the Independent Group (IG) was generously open to messy vitality and flattened hierarchies, conveyed through metaphors like ‘the long front of culture’ (Kalina, 2006: 61) and ‘a democracy of images’ (p. 57). The Smithsons deployed advertisements as evidence of an emergent way of life and referred to them as ‘visually loaded messages about possibilities for the immediate future’ (Smithson and Smithson, 1973: 1). Ben Highmore (2007: 713) has explored the Smithsons’ idea of design as a ‘sensibility primer’. Environments and objects appeared as probes from the future, distilling new kinds of meaning and modes of operating to ease the temporal passage into a transformed everyday reality. ‘This is Tomorrow’ with its multiple projections and anticipations was loosely structured to establish an assemblage of potential scenarios. In their book Without Rhetoric (1973), which recalls the forceful appeal of the future, Peter and Alison Smithson refer to another key element of the 1956 exhibits – the impulse to create a harbinger of a future in which the

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technology and mechanisms are under control to the extent that they create a sense of seamless and mysterious effects, a magical sensation of an easeful symbiosis of objects and users that the keen cinema-goers of the IG admired in the mise en scène of Hollywood films. ‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibited the IG’s core contribution as a full-on technoanthropological engagement with a future that seemed to have stalled in the gloomy, wrecked landscapes of Europe, but was already fully underway on the other side of the Atlantic. I am interested here in what ‘tomorrow’ might have meant in 1956. Laurence Alloway was wary of previous naïve ‘futures’, warning in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue (1956) that there is always a dissonance between the futures of the past and the actuality of the present. However, the young men who contributed to the Whitechapel exhibition were aware of the signs of imminent change that were as much to do with attitudes as technologies. In the next 15 years, British and European avant-gardes rehearsed ‘tomorrows’ that were more utopian and disruptive and, simultaneously, more pessimistic and apocalyptic than were to transpire. Components of ‘This Is Tomorrow’ are co-terminous with ‘contemporary’ – merely a restyling exercise that repackaged existing technologies. The newspaper and media reviews tended to find predictable problems in deciding how to understand the exhibits. They were amused and alarmed by the degree of modernist abstraction, the presence of ‘art autre’ and the bricolaged items of everyday reality that were sometimes confusingly continuous and indifferent. Pathe News was particularly troubled by the difficulty of deciding ‘just where does sculpture and painting end and the architecture begin’.2 The most celebrated and popular exhibits – Pavilions 2, 6 and 12 – tried to conjure enigmatic futures out of the materials of popular culture. They offered allegorical montages in a generous spirit of divination that was concerned with how new juxtapositions impacted on the senses. ‘This is Tomorrow’ hypothesised the kinds of sensory adjustments that viewer/citizens might have to make in order to come to terms with new disorienting media. Laurence Alloway was particularly emphatic about an imbued responsibility to learn how to interpret the condensed and accelerated realm of an incipient future. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his influential essay ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, published in 1946 and highly valued by some Parisian-oriented members of the IG, was particularly curious about the art of the future, but wary of predicting: ‘No one can tell what the painting of tomorrow will be like – one cannot judge a painting until it is done’ (see Sartre, 1956) The members of the IG were concerned with the existential engagement of entering into, what Alloway (1959: 34–35) referred to as a ‘continuum’3 – a participation in the ‘tangled channels of everyday communication’. There is every indication that they saw this blurring of categories as the intrusion of a future in which spectators and consumers would be more actively engaged in negotiating meaning – an aspect of a kind of activism proposed by Archigram’s later emphasis on ‘control and choice’ (Cook, 1999: 69).

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‘Tomorrow’ was already a familiar and highly charged world, much used in the visionary oriented America of the interwar years. In the 1950s it had a currency in a number of campaigns warning against threats of communism and atomic war. A feature of the anxiety of the Cold War was a splitting between the infernal iconography of Hiroshima and Auschwitz on the one hand and, on the other, leisured utopias constructed in a future made effortless and pleasurable by robotics, abundant ‘free’ energy and individual self sufficiency. Images of future nuclear attacks on cities were frequently featured in such publications as Life and Colliers in the early 1950s. There were campaigns in the USA and Australia deploying posters with lurid scenarios of invasion and brutality by Communist sympathizers and invaders entitled ‘Is This Tomorrow: America under Communism?’4 ‘Tomorrow’ was a term synonymous with menace. In 1956 a onehour radio programme produced by ABC and hosted by Orson Welles dramatised a nuclear attack on middle America on behalf of the Civil Defence authorities.5 In 1954, Robert Jungk, who was later to become a prominent campaigner against nuclear weapons, published an influential book entitled Tomorrow Is Already Here.6 It explored, in a series of journalistic reports, the increasing presence of the ‘rocket state’ in all aspects of American life, in the form of dystopian government agencies, bureaucratic centralisation, the deployment of personality and polygraph tests and the commercial uses of motivational research. Jungk deplored the use of computers in political decision making and the ecological disasters resulting from the use of new technologies. Although the ‘dark Gods’ of atavism are present throughout his account of the presence of Tomorrow in the ‘now’ of Cold War America, the book ends with a redemptive chapter on ‘The return of the Thinker’ – ‘men’ capable of developing new sensibilities necessary to redeem the menacing consequences of adversarial technologies. Herbert Agar, who provides the Introduction, comments: ‘This is a warning, and an example of a suicidal quality in our tomorrow’ (Jungk, 1954: 3). The IG were generally more optimistic, albeit with some apprehension regarding the military industrial complex and the ecological issues raised by Jungk. Beatriz Colomina (2004) in her penetrating analysis of the Smithsons’ work of 1956 suggests that the conventionally futuristic ‘House of Tomorrow’ – a plastic, mass produced, transitory amenity that prefigures the ubiquitous pods and gaskets of 60s experimental architecture – shares a ‘tomorrow’ with the primitivist, and for some observers, post apocalyptic ‘Patio and Pavilion’ exhibit of ‘This Is Tomorrow’. She sees in them both ‘a tranquil garden erected in the face of an imagined horror … both sharing characteristics with the bomb shelter’ (p. 40) For other members of the IG, the future was largely posited on the benefits of consumerism and the penetration of everyday life and behaviour by new technologies. At a more immediate level, their ‘tomorrow’ implied a decline in the authority of a status quo of Idealist, Purist ‘Bloomsbury’ aesthetics locally embodied by Herbert Read and his assumptions about the ‘dull and

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indifferent public’.7 Individual members of the group had encountered agents of even older cultural values, notably in the person of Sir Alfred Munnings who taught Paolozzi and Turnbull at the Slade. Reyner Banham mounted his own stroppy rebellion against the moods and personalities that reinforced the orthodoxies of Modernism and Alloway, consistently challenging what he called ‘obstinate absolutes’ and the obstructive seniors who embodied them (Whiteley, 2012: 43). Alison Smithson (1968: 101) evokes the sense of an obstructive establishment in her description of the common ground of the IG as based on ‘the fact that we were all queuing to get on in life’. Indeed the contributors to ‘This Is Tomorrow’ seem to have been regarded as slightly irresponsible juniors who were unrepresentative of the art establishment. Bryan Robertson, a key instigator of the exhibition wrote a letter to its organiser Theo Crosby in which he suggested that he would prefer the inclusion of leading artists, like Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, and that he valued experience and seniority, qualities that, it was implied, the organisers of ‘This Is Tomorrow’ lacked. In the early 1960s, Banham (1960: 45) wrote of the need to move beyond the ‘wooden sentiments’ of AE Richardson and the ‘neo-Georgian and Playboy phases’ of English architecture, and Toni del Renzio reacted against ‘a certain academicising purism, which somehow separated art from life and spoke about “harmony”’ (Robbins, 1990: 124). There is abundant testimony in the writings and memoirs of the IG of a sense of futurity as a liberation. In his book The Angry Decade (1958), Kenneth Allsop notes that one of the strategies of youthful dissidents in the 1950s was to question and dismantle the assumed unities of culture and social behaviour. He deploys the phrase ‘delinks’ (p. 21) (attributing it to the ‘delinquency notice’ used in American universities to signal the withdrawal of a defaulting student) to convey this mood of deconstructing and recombining as a distinctively modern form of protest. For the IG, collage and the shock juxtaposition of scales, genres and spaces served this purpose. Judging creative work in terms of its ability to communicate ideas – their validation of the urban scene and stress on the active role of the spectator and the expendability of conventions – all suggested the formation of a new generational and generative attitude. In every address to the future there are recursive glimpses of what Robert Jungk in his Tomorrow Is Already Here (1954) refers to as old dark myths still dangerously latent in a contemporary world. In ‘This Is Tomorrow’, the IG mobilised the debris of the present as well as the charismatic forms of high technology. Their engagement with culture at the ICA is characterised by an ambivalent dialectic between the world of tomorrow and the past that it sprang from. Bruno Latour (1993) has suggested that the ‘Great Divide’, between Nature and Culture was provisionally and insecurely constructed by the sages of the Enlightenment. The organisers of ‘This Is Tomorrow’, with their refusal of Aristotelian thought were capable of maintaining hybrid/mythic play of part objects that they

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composed into a tentative synthesis, already apparent in previous exhibitions at the ICA and characteristic of their eclectic programmes of lectures and discussions. ‘The Museum Without Walls’8 strategy of juxtaposed objects from varying historical contexts was present in the ‘as found’ aesthetic of Brutalism. Nigel Henderson’s photographs of the Hunstanton Secondary School under construction show a modernist framework emerging from a roughly textured site reminiscent of his anthropological photographs of East End street games. The Patio and Pavilion exhibit was similarly archaeological, and the Golden Lane collages juxtapose a cargo cult enthusiasm for the perfection of Mies van der Rohe as an exemplum of American glamour, with an affiliation to the disorganised material and cultural debris from which the buildings emerge. The IG, along with other members of Group X such as Aldo van Eyck, emphasised an urban fabric of ‘place and occasion’ (Smithson, 1968: 101). The Smithsons, in particular, tended to be suspicious of the utopian ‘tomorrows’ of earlier modernists; instead their explorations seem to accord more closely with what Bruno Latour (1993: 30) has termed ‘the anthropological matrix’, where science, language and the social imagination overlap. This dialectic of the techno-primitive extends through Banham’s longterm fascination with the ‘gizmo’ (Banham, 1965: 48) which appears in his writings as a harbinger of domesticated programmable prosthetic communication and transportation devices that were emerging in the space programme. In parallel to other avant gardes and countercultural initiatives, the future was seen as a layered and fractured space comprising ‘add ons’ and skeuomorphs. John McHale, in his 1967 review of ‘Understanding media’ (cited in McHale, 2011: 82), notes that McLuhan’s ideal of ‘tribal man’ seems to him an indication that there is no longer ‘a single technology’. Unlike the smoothly textured ‘Worlds of Tomorrow’ presented in New York in 1939 and 1964, there was room for regression and the reappropriation of tribal and communitarian ways of living and a particular fascination with the nomadic. Archigram very actively promoted ideas of the spaceman nomad and ‘electronic aborigines’ (Cook, 1999: 116–119). In a 1971 essay, David Greene suggests: Our architectures are the residue of a desire to secure ourselves to the surface of the planet … our anchors to the surface of the planet should be software, like songs or dreams or myths. Abandon hardware, Earth’s surface anchors. (Sadler, 2005: 179) There are hints of this willing confusion of past and present and respect for mythus and software in ‘This Is Tomorrow’. The mood of participation and revisionary engagement was influenced by the notion of play – a possible influence from Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and the ludic energies of early Modernists. There were widespread assumptions that ‘tomorrow’ would be a leisured time bringing with it an obligation to find more

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playful, and anarchically co-operative, ways of engaging with art and the environment. London, in particular needed an imaginative future – a tomorrow more in line with living in a world of abundance and ingenuity. ‘This Is Tomorrow’ made its debut in a war-damaged city, still experiencing austerity, severe air pollution and prescriptive orthodoxies. Hope sprang from the growing availability of new materials, bright colours and the promise of labour saving technology. The strong mood of futurity, nourished by glimpses of American plenty and science fictions is captured by David Mellor in his essay ‘A Glorious Technicolour’ where he called it ‘Tory Futurism’ (Robbins, 1990: 229–236). More recently, Francis Spufford (2003) and James HamiltonPaterson (2010) have imaginatively re-animated the technological base from which unrealised futures were extrapolated. Simon Winder’s amusing and illuminating thoughts on the mythus of James Bond evokes the attractions of trans-Atlantic awareness: When the second James Bond novel ‘Live and Let Die’ landed before an, on the whole, rather indifferent public in 1954, it teemed not only with a wonderful underwater fantasy of a new kind but with American-ness. As Bond flies into New York, he jumps across an almost indescribably vast divide between a culture, which by the fifties had little to look forward to beyond the next Benjamin Britten opera or Lord of the Flies and a culture that was striding into a dramatic and turbulent age of greatness. (Winder, 2006: 110) He proceeds to list many of the items that inspired young British artists of the time: Little Richard, Charlie Mingus, North by Northwest, the Seagram building, De Kooning, Rebel Without a Cause, the Guggenheim, Some Like It Hot, satellites, computers, the space programme and contraceptive pills. For the members of the IG, American culture, even in the two-dimensional representations unpacked from the spiv-like suitcase of John McHale, was remarkable for its lavish expressive qualities and the techniques of mediation – the bright colours, highlights, tricks of focus, textures and transitions brought a new kind of semiotic awareness to the riot of signification of advertisements and the optimistic consumer ethos of Americana. Paolozzi in his work ‘Baroque All Star High [B.A.S.H.]’ of 1971 looks back at the preoccupations of the BUNK period as: ‘what you would see just sitting down to a television evening, turning the knob from one channel to another’ (Spencer, 2001: 219). In 1956 the narratives of Modernism, both in its pre-war ‘World of Tomorrow’ and its purist and increasingly international European manifestations, seemed inadequate to the promise of a plausible ‘tomorrow’. For Banham, Modernism had become an Academy. In his history of modern architecture, published in 1961, he proposed the Crystal Palace and Eiffel Tower as

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buildings of compelling relevance to the mid century present. In The New Brutalism (1966), he paraphrased Le Corbusier to express a materialist tendency already present in 1956: ‘to construct moving relationships out of brute materials’ (p. 16). Technologies impacting on everyday life were stimulants for his interests in ‘well tempered environments’ (Banham, 1969) and mobile living. ‘This Is Tomorrow’ was driven by the need to modernise Modernity. Amedee Ozenfant, whose creatively illustrated Foundations of Modern Art, originally published in 1928 and an influential text for members of the IG, was reprinted in 1952, with a preface that included an address to the post atomic art of the 50s future: We shall no longer content ourselves with works that a flicker of the eye exhausts. Our eyes will be offered elaborate interplays of forms designed to compel our sight to linger and to integrate them into the motion of Time … the man of tomorrow will see via new telescopic or microscopic radars not only what our superficial retinas see. (p. vii) The idea of an expanded art, empowered by science and technology, was widespread and evident as a driving force of the ICA and Whitechapel Art Gallery shows. The vision of a creative ‘tomorrow’ that would engage the a-focalism of Klee, the ‘non Euclidean’ spaces of Matta, the morphological warping of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s related forms, alongside explorations of semantics, games theory and derivations of wartime operational research were all present in embryo in the short career of the Group. Perhaps the most significant address to tomorrow was the Smithsons’ ‘House of the Future’ which captured the mood of engagement with mass production, the leisure that would result from a full engagement with technology and the self sufficiency which was simultaneously invoked in the space programme and the widely exhibited Cold War weapon – the American kitchen. Creative resources promised by wartime and post war mobilisation – the space programme, computers, robotics and nuclear power were tantalising components of a dramatically re-engineered future. In 1949, Ossip Flechtheim established the term ‘futurology’ and suggested that this would involve a study of the full range of cultural activities in a kind of anthropology of the future. Andrew Ross in his essay ‘Getting the future we deserve’ (see Ross, 1991: 169–192) describes the influence of the waxing ’military, industrial, academic complex’ and its determined programme of prediction. In 1957, the year of Sputnik, a symposium on ‘The Next Hundred Years’ was held in New York, sponsored by Seagram. Over the next decade ‘The Future’ was an intensely investigated and conjectured subject, but it was also a relatively short-lived phenomenon. By 1970, there was already a sense of foreclosure, and the costs of hypothetical ‘tomorrows’ were more frequently questioned. By 1972, MIT was exploring ‘the limits to growth’ and the future was no longer a space for unrestrained optimism.

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The intensely visual future exhibited in 1956 was the beneficiary of literary and visual fictions that feature in the work and imagination of the IG. Reyner Banham was particularly enchanted by the cosmic visions of Chesney Bonestell, who had worked in the special effects department at RKO in Hollywood. Science fiction was a treasury of inspirations as the homage to Forbidden Planet (dir. Fred M Wilcox, 1956) – perhaps the most conspicuous exhibit of the show demonstrated. The contemporary availability of a new kind of science fiction from American ‘pulp’ magazines – especially such sources as Astounding Science Fiction, edited by John W Campbell – was particularly inspirational. Paolozzi found in science fiction a higher order of imagination than he did in art journals. Van Vogt was an important source of ideas, particularly the concept of ‘null-A’ – non Aristotelian thought – which suggested to its IG readers new ways of assimilating irrational and lateral ideas, coherent with the already powerful influence of Dada. I’d like to acknowledge Van Vogt’s influence without pretending to understand his stories, or the specific appeal he had for the members of the IG. His novel The World of Null A (1949) was the first of the stories from Astounding Science Fiction to be adopted by a publisher and produced in book form. The peculiar film noir-ish discontinuities in his plots were partly the result of his modus operandi of linking together dream-inspired scenarios and partly the result of reworking short stories into longer narratives. The novel describes a future set in the year 2550. The hero ‘Gosseyn’ (Go Sane?) who dies and is re-incarnated in a second body, is empowered by a second brain which contains the full realisation of ‘nullA’ – non Aristotelian thought. The plot features a supercomputer that administers a universal quiz only answerable by contestants with trained null-A minds. Success in the quiz enables winners to become the natural rulers of the world, and, if sufficiently acknowledged by the ruling group, to live on a utopian terraformed Venus. Gosseyn and his unactivated mind is a threat to galactic tyrants who seek to overthrow the forces of the ‘General Semantics Institute’. Like his fellow contributor L Ron Hubbard, Van Vogt was interested in the possibility of reconditioning the human mind in accord with the new potentialities of science. The concept ‘null-A’ refers to the work of Count Korzbyski’s notion of ‘general semantics’. This was first formulated in his book Science and Sanity of 1933. A new edition appeared in 1947, in which Korzbyski proposed a new way of understanding unconscious reactions by developing an awareness of their stages of perception, dispensing with programmed responses. This involved unlearning conventional assumptions arising from abstracted thought. Korzbyski’s dictum – ‘The map is not the territory’ (1973[1933]: 750) (a phrase subsequently associated with Ralph Rumney, who had authored a psychogeographic critique of London’s ‘standard urban future’, and in 1957 became the only British member of the Situationist International) suggests a regard for the materiality of understanding that is part of the IG rejection of the aesthetic in dominance that they attributed to the malign influence of Herbert Read. This rejection

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of a tendency to formalist abstraction can be seen as a persistent aspect of the IG’s insistence on the encounter with the overdetermined complexities of the everyday. Korzybski also warned against ‘time binding’ (1973[1933]: 539) – the passing on of knowledge from generation to generation, as a contribution to the increasing abstraction and meta conceptualisation. Van Vogt was one of a number of science fiction writers who constructed stories that involved totalitarian societies, often dominated by computers and structured in terms of ritual games. Philip Dick’s Solar Lottery of 1955 had a similar rationale. Frederic Jameson (2005: 318) has suggested a fundamental link between the two writers. This trope, involving a radical discontinuity of spaces and dramatic identity transformations, can be read as a metaphor for the generational experience of war and the arbitrary authority games that were the imaginative experience of Cold War culture. An issue of Astounding Science Fiction of June 1950, the cover of which, by the artist Ron Miller, was used by Alloway to illustrate an essay in Architectural Design, features the story ‘Incommunicado’ by Katherine McLean. In McLean’s story, the inhabitants of a space station develop a rapport with the computer that controls its functions via musical tones in what is termed a ‘bebop’ environment (Campbell, 1950: 6). The issue’s editorial refers to recent discussions on ‘dianetics’ and the possibility of developing an educational system devoted to ‘data recall’ (pp. 4–5). It seems that readers of Astounding Science Fiction were familiar with speculation about new ways of thinking and communicating in which the use of computers would modify the human sensorium. McLean, a frequent contributor to Astounding Science Fiction worked as a laboratory technician and was particularly interested in Systems Theory.9 Alloway admitted to having read little of Korzbyski, but he was interested in Systems Theory, and particularly in the writings of Norbert Wiener, from whose work he derived a sense of ‘a network’ of non-hierarchic messages (Whiteley, 2012: 53–58). Working with Geoffrey Holroyd who had visited the Eames and was interested in their ‘tackboard’ aesthetic to create the Group 12 exhibit, he recognised the value of a semiological system which enabled relationships and relative meanings to be constantly reinterpreted. The Eames, whose film A Communications Primer had been screened at the ICA just before ‘This Is Tomorrow’ were paradigms of playfulness and resistance to idealist thinking. For ‘This Is Tomorrow’ – the Group 12 exhibit – a collaboration with Geoffrey Holroyd and Toni del Renzio indicated a predictive stance on how a new world of disparate information might be formatted for a developing ‘systems’ awareness of a democracy of images conceived in the spirit of liberatory juxtaposition. The ‘tackboard’ aesthetic of digitised discrete images were freed from accustomed responses and liberated in terms of their combinatory potential – a harbinger of the limitless archive and the combinatory delirium of the internet. Group 12 was particularly influenced by the Eames, whose film A Communications Primer had been shown at the

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ICA in April 1956, and who embodied for the members of the IG a glimpse of a possible future for design and lifestyle (Curtis,1999: 381–383). Perhaps the most urgent address to a ‘tomorrow’ in 1956 was the attempt to exemplify new ways of thinking that were compatible with the emerging technologies and experiences of the moment. There was little cohesion among the exhibits, but in the case of those that emerged from the intensely explored culture of the IG there is an attempt to suggest how new forms of creativity could anticipate a near future of interaction, and negotiate a full engagement with complexity – a freeing up of the linear, evaluative, hierarchical systems that prevailed in the ‘Today’ of 1956. The exhibition sought to produce an atomized and relativized awareness in a stimulated audience that were exhorted to respond as alert consumers. The ‘Tomorrow’ of 1956 was already alive to the rich potential of semiotics, codes and heterarchies. Notes 1. A phrase attributed to Toni del Renzio in Miles (2010: 65). Whiteley (2012: 42) suggests that it originated in David Riesman’s ‘The Lonely Crowd’ and was used by Alloway and others without acknowledgement. 2. ‘Face of Tomorrow’, Pathe News. Available at: http://www.britishpathe.com/ video/face-of-tomorrow [this comment at 38 seconds] (accessed 20 March 2013). 3. Although usually attributed to Alloway, the use of this term first appears in print in McHale (1955: 37). Alloway used the term ‘continuum from data to fantasy’ in his article in Architectural Design, February 1958. 4. A 48-page propaganda comic book published by the Catechetical Guild Educational Society in 1947 – an estimated four million copies were distributed. 5. See http://www.myoldradio.com/old-radio-episodes/orson-welles-tomorrows-civil-defense-drama-1/9 for a dramatisation of Philip Wylie’s 1954 novel Tomorrow. Welles opens with a quote from Proverbs 27: ‘Boast not thyself of to morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.’ 6. The full text is available at http://archive.org/details/ tomorrowisalread00jungrich (accessed 20 March 2013). 7. A term used in Read (1956[1934]). 8. Malraux’s concept of a virtualised image gallery first appeared in his Voices of Silence published in 1953. It was fully formulated in ‘Museum Without Walls’ (1954). 9. Particularly in the work of Ludwig von Bertalannfy, who in 1950 contributed an essay on ‘An outline of Systems Theory’ to the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

References Alloway L (1956) ‘This is Tomorrow’ catalogue. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery. Alloway L (1958) The arts and the mass media. Architectural Design, February. Alloway L (1959) City notes. Architectural Design 29, January.

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Barry Curtis is Emeritus Professor of Visual Culture at Middlesex University, a Fellow of the London Consortium and Tutor at the Royal College of Art. He has a longstanding interest in post-war British culture and has published catalogue essays on the Independent Group, British pop art, art and psychedelia and Cold War culture. He has recently contributed to the Glam exhibition (Tate Liverpool 2012). His book Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (Reaktion Books, 2009) is part of ongoing research into the mystery of objects and the imaginary in architecture and design. Address: Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU, UK. [email: [email protected]]