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Synopsis: Barbrook, Richard - Imaginary Futures

Chapter 3 - Exhibiting new Technology

During the 1964 New Yorks World Fair the americans could gaze at a new type of vision of future: "inter- planetary spaceships, nuclear fusion reactors and thinking machines". With the american "superpower" optimism(for this time) was it not necessary that this technologies not exist.

This big exhibtion had his predecessor in the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in the Central Park in London. It was organzied by the elite of the britain empire and showed artefacts of all colonies and the latest inventions under the issue of industrialisation. A short quoted list of the exhibitions inventory: "steam engines, telegraph machines, silk dresses, glassware, workers’ housing, Gothic Revival furniture, scientific instruments and even a stuffed Indian elephant".

The aim for the festival was to show the greatness of the britain empire. During the exhibition the conservative organisation committee had not the best feeling, if large numbers of people will be on one place at the same time. They thought it is possible that this masses of people will be uncontrollable. The Exhibtion showed a new type of indsutiral econemy, a system that creates a product without a relationship to the worker who produced it or in the words of Barbrook "Things not people now ruled the world." It was in the sense of the organisators to promote and focus on the quality and design of the goods without questioning the situation of the production.

After this exhibition other countries organised there own industrial festival, to show them as part of modernity. Following this trend the next milestones was for example the 1889 "Paris Universal Exposition" with the Eiffel Tower. In the 1937 Paris International Exhibition the visitors were confronted with totalitarismus visions of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. In opposition to this the 1939 New York World’s Fair showed a democratic vision of the epoch of mobilization.

Chapter 4 - Engineering Illusions

The 1939 New York World’s Fair was under the icon of the motor car - it was presented as the part of everday reality for everyone. The imaginary future scenario for the visitors to the 1964 New York World’s Fair were "space rockets, nuclear reactors and mainframe computers". But what went wrong, that the technologial vision of the 1964 World Fair never became reality? Barbrook describe for this situations the following reasons. Technologies like rockets, reactors and computers were "in development" by state-funded institution driven by the situation of the cold war. In 1939 was the target customer - of the shown technologies - the mass, in 1964 there was only one customer the government itself and so the 1964 "needed a much higher level of fetishisation".