Patrick Gyger

During the first intervention of this year LIFT conference, Patrick J. Gyger remarked that in the middle of the last century we were told that sci-fi literature was “extravagant fiction today cold fact tomorrow”. But if we look back at that time we can easily notice that the image of the future was more a kind of style, a leitmotif, rather than a real prediction. Examples of this stylish future are the bizarre architecture, glamour cities, flying cars.

Actually now we are living in the future of our grandparents. But the future seems to have taken a different form. Of course we’re still missing invisibility and tele-trasportation, but some of the concepts are here even if most of them have been realized without reaching their goals. That’s what Nicolas Nova calls “failures of Holy Grails”, inventions and products that didn’t success because of different reason: the technology wasn’t ready, they didn’t answer to any real need. For instance, the myth of the flying car inspired a lot of concepts like the “Airphibina” (1946) or the “Aerocar” (1949). They all failed because people didn’t really need a flying car. They just “wanted to dream about them”. Therefore in 2009 we can still see amazing old FIAT 500 running in the street instead of the flying taxi of “The fifth elemet”.

However, in Gyger’s opinion, today we’re living both the dreams and the nightmare of our grandparents. In one hand we’ve seen the dream of the tech-utopia become reality, we feel that we are living in THE future and we don’t dare too much to have a new visions of it. In the other hand we feel as living in dystopia, where technology is not longer a savior of humanity but rather the greatest threat, a danger to our private life.