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On Chitty Chitty We Depend:

Hope, Turbulence and the Provisional

James Connors

...what is true is that each and every criticism of imperfection, incompleteness, intolerance and

impatience already without a doubt presupposes the conception of, and longing for, a possible

perfection. Otherwise, there would not be any imperfection if there were not something in the

process that should not be there – if imperfection did not go around in the process, in particular,

as a critical element. One thing is certainly against it: hope is the opposite of security. It is the

opposite of naive optimism. The category of danger is always within it. This hope is not

confidence... If it could not be disappointed, it would not be hope... —Ernst Bloch1  

Time Machines

Gadgets and machines are everywhere. We all use them, and one can anticipate that successive

versions of them, such as cars, smartphones and computers, will continue to develop when we are no

longer around. But what is often overlooked is how and why these forms appear the way they do, and

what this process indicates about how we perceive and create anticipation. When I look at my car, or in

this case, the smartphone in my hand, I often feel as though it is in the process of having a forthcoming

state, a futurity. This is because I know that it is but one of many descendents from the “Tricorder”

featured in the original Star Trek series (Fig. 1). The Tricorder was a fictional multipurpose contraption

that bears resemblance to many gadgets of the 1960s. As a composite of TVs, radios, phones, sensors,

and cameras, this form indicates a specific era's anticipation by showing what, why and how the

impossible could become possible. And it succeeded. In between 1966 and 2014 this form indeed

would further become remote controls, Walkmans, pagers, GPS devices and smartphones, et cetera.

1 Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, Trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, 1975 MIT Press, p.16

Though less generative, I perceive my smartphone as only one of many iterations that are still

branching out from the original Tricorder, a form among many others that are extending anticipation

through time.

Figure 1

Tricorder, featured in Star Trek (Original TV Series 1966-69)

I propose that machines and gadgets have a kind of evolution all on their own. What distinguishes this

process from that of natural selection is that it is contingent on a viewer's receptivity to—and a creator's

subsequent reutilization of—the forms' provisionality. Analogous to Charles Darwin's “transitional

forms,” these forms are models, prototypes, temporary contrivances that are often created by whatever

means at hand and likely to be changed.2 They were mutable. The shabby Wright brothers' plane used

bicycle parts, and the gadget that has become the Oculus Rift used ski goggles. Despite being perceived

as unfinished, disorderly and impractical, the turbulent origin of these formations, the flux of different

intentions and times into one form illuminates the anticipation (a phrase that will be discussed below)

present at its time of creation, forging a vector along which future forms appear.

2 “If species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable

transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?” Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1st ed. London 1859, pg 171.172

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Figure 2

Oculus Rift prototype (2012)

Figure 3

The Time-Machine from Back To The Future (1985)

Perceiving anticipation in, and futurity through, the provisional forms of gadgets and machines is

driven by how one experiences form and creative action. These sensibilities appear to be conditioned

from an early age by a process of orientation. I myself am attracted to artwork that looks constructed by

any and all means at hand, by improvisations that follow a functional logic even if they will never

actually work. I can readily attribute this preference to how and when I perceived the time machine in

Back To The Future I, II & III (1985, 1989, 1990). As a film prop (Fig. 2) it was just a functional

looking hodgepodge, but as I experienced it through the eyes of Marty McFly, the protagonist, this

fictional object became an extraordinary feat of ingenuity that transported me. It was Thanksgiving, I

was six, and over the course of a marathon I saw an older boy travel into the past and future in what

was and still is the most incredible looking machine I have ever seen. This was a machine with a

function, time travel, that was not just expressed through a narrative but through its form. For example,

the plutonium reactor required for time travel in the original film was switched out for a future fusion

generator in its sequel. One can see a progression from Figures 3, 4 & 5 that not only shows how an

accumulation of temporary fixtures overtime caused the form to eventually appear disorderly, but also

why. Having to perform one action, time travel, this machine became an ever more mutable

aggregation, discarding and accumulating the aspirations and—implicitly, the limits of—different

futurities on its surface through forms. This caused a culmination of forgotten and still hoped for

elements to be animated in unison, causing the machine to look futuristic, retro, ridiculous and entirely

new. Gathering futurities once perceived or still to come in trains, cars, electronics, planes, spaceships,

nuclear power plants, and reutilizing them all in one assembled form, directs ones attention to where,

when and what we have anticipated, and how anticipation is formed. This allows one to not just to see

the anticipations made visible in the time machine, but to perceive within similar formations an action

of hope, an action that requires a temporal mixing and a turbulent quality to order to extend through

time.

Figure 4

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The Time-Machine from Back To The Future II (1989)

Figure 5

The Time-Machine from Back To The Future III (1990)

It is well known that machines and gadgetry, for better or worse, have changed the way we live

significantly. Less well known is how we have been participants in this provisional evolution, this

extension of anticipation from the multitude of gadgets, machinery and works of art realized, mutated

and further realized through science fiction. Take the car for example. Generations of these creations

can be seen on a typical street, each one blending, like a constantly reworked painting, the ambitions of

separate eras. Fragments of the prototypical horseless carriage, the first aerodynamic race cars of the

1920s, the jet car hybrids of the 1950s and many other provisional forms that find their way into the

cars of today continue to show us that the futures once hoped for are all still being actively driven

toward, so to speak, via the languages of form and formation, whether motivated by the creations of

science fiction or vice verse. While Ford's Space Age inspired “Levacar” never became mainstream,

eight years later The Jetsons depicted a future where the dream of everyone owning their own

hovercraft was already realized. This show was on the air for 25 years and ushered in the flying cars of

Back to the Future II (1989), The Fifth Element (1997), Star Wars Episode One: The Clone Wars

(2002) and many others. While presenting fictional chimeras of the past, would be creators reutilized

sci-fi prototypes and took them in many separate directions. We can now print skin, build living

environments, land robots on comets and capture carbon emissions with nanobots. Though the self-

driving electric cars seen in Minority Report (2001) don’t hover or time travel, they are machines we

will all likely own whether we want to or not.3 But what is difficult to determine is how this

progression works—a process that requires a quality of disorder in a form to endure, to extend

anticipation and evolve. Despite this, I suspect there is a vector of creativity underlying these forms

driven by an active principle of hope, a hope that is energized and acted out in co-dependence with

turbulence. What will be speculated and argued throughout this thesis is not just how provisional forms

have changed the way the world looks, but how they maintain a state of forming, an action of hope.

Bloch: Hope, Serres: Turbulence

Why does one get up in the morning? Why do animals take a step forward? And why do we keep on

making things? These various actions have an invariable direction and movement, one of futurity. Is

there not an element of expectation, anticipation, intention, that is, hope which one can perceive

through their form? Hope is a hard thing to describe. As a verb it means “to want something to happen 3 http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/self-driving-cars-will-change-transportation-forever/

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or be true and think that it could happen or be true.” In language, three nouns often suffice to represent

this: expectation, anticipation and intention. But here an action has only been symbolized into states,

causing a problem as Henri Bergson would say, for this implies “the absurd proposition that movement

is made of immobilities.”4 Hope is a movement of futurity, and one can only speculate on how it

subsists through the reception and creation of art. What concerns this section is a matter of theorizing

how and where hope may move through art. When (and if) this is done then provisional forms can be

analyzed to see how hope is fostered through a creative process into an experience others can feel and

desire to recreate.

For Ernst Bloch, creativity was an action driven by hope toward “not-yet-become” possibility. It was a

movement that expressed futurity through a form. Bloch thought form was embedded with creative

human activity, which in itself “seeks to make a better world.” To explain this, he theorized that works

from the past, ranging from architecture, paintings, fairy tales to medical breakthroughs had a surplus

called “anticipatory illumination” (Vor-Schein):

Anticipatory illumination mediates through the working, realizing subject that which is still

only illusion with that which could become appearance. To be sure this is no longer appearance

in the Kantian transcendental sense but in the materialist sense of a qualitative reality that has

been requalified. Illusion moves through anticipatory illumination to a realizable future that is

reachable no matter how far away. However, it remains problematic as a more-than-this future.

Anticipatory illumination is...subjective anticipation of something that is objectively realizable

that provides the measure for the anticipation and to experience real criticism.5

In addition, this surplus allows viewers in the present to perceive a “successive continuation of

4 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution: Selected Essays, p.309-311 5 Ernst Bloch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), p. 126-127

implications” where they can compare the condition of their present against the array of futures

anticipated in the past:

This is just the same thing as the emphasis on the future in the past as significant and continues

to be significant to the degree that the genuine agent of cultural heritage reaches into the past,

and in this very same act the past itself anticipates him, involves and needs him.6

In other words, a viewer can witness in a previous creators work “the journey of its time and the

concerns of its time,” and can subsequently ascertain its value by “measuring” the effect of its

reutilizations—its cultural and material implications—against what has not-yet-become from our

vantage point in the present. This is what the movement of hope does, and in Bloch's words it proceeds

towards “the still unclosed determinateness of existence, superior to any res finita.”

An unorthodox Marxist writing after the fallout of WWI, Bloch initially observed that individuals have

presentiments towards what they lack, what they want and what they hope to find. This lead him to

believe that consciousness is formed by the impulse of hope. Elements of the lacking and wished for,

what he called the not-yet-become, are physically represented in the “not-yet-conscious” as images one

sees in daydreams. Far from escapism, Bloch posited that daydreams enable subjects to produce signs

and forms oriented to real, objective possibilities in the future.7 Bloch described the process that leads

from a wishful image to a concrete work as a “work-forming” (Werkbildend): where “productivity sets

itself into what is next to it as a triple extension triply growing into that which has not come: as

incubation, as so called-inspiration, as explication.”8 In The Principle of Hope, Bloch further elaborated

on this process by applying it to how the affects of art, design, literature, architecture and music impact 6 Ibid. p.46 7 Zipes, 1975, MIT Press xxxii 8 Ibid. xxxii

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the events of history. Termed “concrete-hope,” these past forms are to be thought of as blueprints,

revealing both the creators orientation to the “unbecome” (the unknown yet hoped for) and how

creators in the future could further articulate it into having “further become.” These bits of concrete-

hope inspire the wishful imagery of daydreams in the present, showing how the hope for something

that “has-not-become” can be further expressed as a form for others to experience.

One of the distinguishing features of Bloch's work is how he proposes a viewer can perceive this

movement in forms. Because he thought contemplative knowledge was relied upon too heavily to

explain and categorize anything unfamiliar and new, he considered the prevailing conceptions of time,

space and matter as overly deterministic, ultimately preventing the unbecome from future becoming.

Relegating anything new to knowledge of the past, this process made the movement of hope seem

immobile and futurity closed by repetition of the past. To counteract this he stated that one must “learn

hope” through an active orientation to hopes “front” so that “novum” (newness) and futurity itself

could be ensured. Importantly, this demands attention to the action of hope to perceive:

The objectively real possibility within process, along the path of the Object itself...[from this]

we can then better align ourselves to hopes anticipatory movement in the present, allowing a

truly new future, intended by hope, to further become...[The task at hand is to perceive] what is

truly hoping in the subject, truly hoped for in the object...[this] is not only a basic feature of

human consciousness, but, concretely corrected and grasped, a basic determination within

objective reality as a whole.9

Becoming aware of the transition from unbecome to further become ensures, as Bloch says, that one

can believe something new is always yet to emerge, that the “never-before-seen” is still possible. This

9 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1954 (in German) 1986 (MIT Press, in English)

is what he meant by saying that hope is “superior to any res finita,” in that knowledge of the past

cannot contain the affect of anticipatory illumination, only ingredients that may form the unknown

“further-becomes” in future creations.

Becoming is another word for futurity. When something is in the process of passing into another state,

this presupposes that it has a forthcoming state, a future. What distinguishes the becoming in Bloch's

notion of hope is that it is contingent on the reception and commencement of forms inspired by

“wishful imagery.” Notice that he chooses the concepts of unbecome and further-become to explain

this. These describe a movement that is neither constant nor orderly, rather one that is intermittent,

jumpy, such as the occurrences of daydreams and experiences of art. They also describe a movement

that follows a certain trajectory, as further implies that it can't ever finally be, but is still on its way.

How could this apparently disorderly and jumpy furthering of wishful imagery work in an artistic

process?

If an artist perceived a form which conveyed a sense that something new, something better, could be

further articulated by reutilizing it in some way, they would begin to imagine what that work might

look like. This prior form would still be in their mind as a key element in whatever they construct,

operating as a general guide. What happens next is what Bloch referred to as “work-forming,” which is

an extension of hopes from the past—about the future—brought into the present. Likewise, the new

work would be an extension of the past form into something else, an action that can be described as a

furthering, one which articulates the anticipations of the past by confronting them, through a form or

forms, with those of the present.

What this model also assumes is that one may have learned hope without necessarily knowing it, and

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that the form would be nonetheless captivating to the extent that it would become a wishful image that

informs how a new creation will look. But what makes the unfinished and turbulent quality of

provisional forms hopeful? Following Bloch's model above, a reformulation occurs between the past

work's intention and the present creators interpretation, causing a certain degree of disorder and

definite change. Could it be that this change is what makes provisional forms generative by showing

the action of hope, that is, a hoping? To hope for something that has not yet become means to wish for

an interruption of a perceived order. This is a hope for change. But how does change work in the jumpy

furthering of wishful imagery? The paradox of this discussion is that the movement of hope, its work-

forming, seems to be co-dependent with an energizing force that is opposed to it: a force of disorder,

somehow causing a form to form.

To make sense of this it helps to imagine a particular figure-ground relationship. Picture a ground of

energetic chaos that is churning like a storm. After awhile, a clearing like the eye of a hurricane begins

to form. A distinct order somehow emerges out of the disorder and redundancy, an order allowed to be

as a ground permits a figure. Witnessing this is to perceive a particular change over the course of time

that creates a place of stability, a place where hope (and futurity) can emerge out of the chaotic space

and energy of disorder that provides the ground of a forming.

This swirling birth of order was described as an affect of turbulence by the Roman philosopher

Lucretius. Examining the flow of streams, he thought there may be a generative force that lay between

order (turba or vortex) and disorder (turbo or turbulence). Michel Serres went further with this idea by

defining it as a “median state between a slightly redundant order and pure chaos... it is a state of birth, a

state of nature... a temporary state... an intermittence of void and plenitude, and intermittence of being

and nothingness.”10 Serres, like Bloch, found that science was in imminent danger of limiting free

thinking to rational procedures. He thought unknown possibility was being closed off by having it

perceived as repetition, so he stressed that one must think outside of order, structure and logic, towards

its genesis in disorder: chaos. Chaos, Serres says, should not be thought of in a negative sense, but

rather to be understood as "positive chaos," that which can allow us to perceive "the ground of order,

order's potentiality, its birth and "moment of birth," which he suggests occurs "in and through

turbulence," since it:

One can gather from this description that what may generate order (the one) is precisely its formulation

out of disorder (the multiple). This is a mash-up or mixing that comes and goes, yet is the prerequisite

for order, time, Being and form. Like Bloch's hope, this is an intermittent movement or process that

comes and goes bringing newness, or likewise mediating between the unbecome and the subsequent

further-become. Except in this model the movement occurs when a unitary order arises like a rhythm

from a noisy multiplicity, or inversely when a one deforms back into a multiple. There is no prescribed

trajectory here, just occurrences of the unformed becoming formed and vice verse.

10 Michel Serres, Genesis, University of Michigan Press, Trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson, 1995 (orig. 1982) p.? 11 Serres, p.121

spins, on itself... [It is an] exquisite state in which there is an order, an inchoate or final order,

and in which disorder and chaos are also be found. Chaos appears there, spontaneously, in the

order, order appears there in the midst of disorder. The turbulent state mixes or associates the

one and the multiple, systematic gathering together and distribution, and disappears there. Here

and there its motion is reversible... it is born of the noise, it is born of the unitary, to some

extant it takes shape, rises up, before breaking apart in the noise... it is time generating newness,

we thus are antiquated with this time from being alive in a new region of turbulence.

Turbulence is widespread everywhere, almost everywhere, yet it is not universal. 11

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This ties back in with Bloch in that he too hinted that this mixing was a necessary part of a creative

process. By claiming that past forms are appropriated by a creator's daydreams and reformulated into

something different, something new, the presumption is that a mixing action is required to extend hope

through a form. If a creator first interpreted and then recombined multiple images and forms from the

past, present and imagined future, it would create an action akin to the form of a montage. This

formation, Bloch claimed, was the real fruit of what concurrent theories of relativism and natural

sciences were producing:

relativism... not objectivity, for it [the montage] improvises with the context that has been

exploded. Out of those (exploded) elements that have become pure and are made into rigid

facades by objectivity, montage creates variable temptations and attempts in the empty space...

Not only does a rationalization of a different society play in it, but one can see a new formation

of figures arising out of the particles of the cultural heritage that have become chaotic. The

montage of the fragment out of the old existence is here the experiment of its reutilization into a

new one.12

For Bloch, the montage replaced the empty space left by the collapse of bourgeois culture, clearing a

path for new humanistic pursuits. Conversely, for Serres, the issue at hand was how one can think

beyond an empty space, reason and binaries. Both relished the idea of an indeterminate conception of

time and space, but pursued that thinking to very different ends.

At this point, we can take a step back from the divergences and draw a larger correlation. If on one

hand we have Bloch considering the not-yet-conscious of an individual as a physical representation of

what has-not-become, and on the other we have Serres with his micro-to-macro multiplicities 12 Ibid. xxxiii

originating from the study of natural formations, what we find are two theorists wrestling with the

question of how to orientate oneself to a space where futurity can be perceived. Where the latter

establishes how one can perceive formations down from a cosmic scale, the former traces out how the

body perceives forms arising from the imagining of one to another through the affect of objects. In this

turbulent schema of global to local contexts, what's at stake is whether or not there is any intention,

expectation and anticipation formed by the act of creativity. The question becomes: why, where, and

how can a form be an action of futurity?

To begin to answer this question it helps to hypothesize an individual work of art. If a work (a form)

appears still-in-progress and on-its-way, it can be considered as an action or a state. This is due to its

transitory provisional quality, where the work-forming of a multiple becoming a one can be seen. For

example, if a viewer were to witness in a form an order arising out of a disorder, like an eye arising out

of a storm, what this means is that a multiple is being perceived as having further become a form, a

one, all the while still remaining visible as a multiple. This provisional forming also implies that many

states of duration can be witnessed simultaneously. Per the montage and hurricane analogies, the

provisional nature of the form has duration, indeed durations, which, according to Bloch and Serres,

are fragments of many past formations—along with all the anticipations and turbulences of their time.

Thus the work's transitory state is an accumulation of disparate, temporary formations originating in

the past, directed toward (anticipating) futurities beyond its own and compacted into a single form.

With historically locatable anticipations presented as only fragments of a larger form, viewers in the

future can perceive where it has been hoping—and still is hoping—for a not-yet-become futurity, and

where it has already become since its original inception.

If this hypothetical work is applied to the category of works I've referred to as “provisional forms,”

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13 Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, 1975 MIT

Press, p.xxxiii

then Bloch's original notion of hope has become a bit more complicated, yet more profound. The

process of creativity may indeed be a jumpy furthering of hope, in no small measure because there are

many separate versions of the future to be perceived through creations of the past. More intriguing still,

it seems that, like the Tricorder, these creations enact hope by condensing their specific durations (past,

present and anticipated future) into a perceivable forming (a hoping), which subsequently branched out

and further-became again and again once they were seen. The differentiation of one work from another

under this rubric could be understood in a highly counter-intuitive way: as a common inclination to

embrace multiple anticipations (with their associated formations) into one enduring, yet open-ended

form. Since disorder can be seen as a condition of anticipation, hope can be attributed to and perceived

in forms have an unfinished model-like appearance.

The value of cross-examining Bloch's principle of hope together with Serres' turbulence is that in the

convergence of the two a reorientation to futurity can be found, both in the works of the past and the

present. What Bloch did was return attention to the creator's intention, the viewer's reception and the

mediation occurring between the two. Author and receiver come together through the work of art to

form the substance and novum of cultural heritage.13 Conversely, Serres reexamines what mediation is

itself, and extends it from a creative human activity to a natural, cosmic action, which allows the

former to be seen not just as a local phenomenon but rather an instance of the action seen in all created

forms.

What is fascinating to me is that the turbulent-hope quality in this hypothetical work would appear to

have a convoluted incipience, one that potentially makes any form, any futurity, appear incomplete. But

as Bloch mentioned early on, this may be a necessary attribute for preventing the immobilization of

hopes movement. It is in the incipient state of the work that one may be most keenly orientated to

hope's movement, its “front” as Bloch called it. Because it is there that one can perceive, in the visible

qualities of the forming work, how and where disorder itself is further-becoming, entering a state of

energetic moving-forward, and engendering a continued hoping. As evidenced in the time machine,

provisional forms do appear necessarily disordered, unfinished, even turbulent, one effect of which is

to project a whole formation of hopes from of the creator's era to creators and viewers in the present,

the affect of which may seem like creating the future.

Science Fiction's Provisions

Now to direct the process of learning hope back towards the succession of implications science fiction

has produced. While the further-become of science fiction films (gadgets, machines and works of art)

may be received by different audiences as either extraordinary or simply derivative, by attending to

how and why these forms came to look the way they do, I propose it is possible to perceive in them

anticipations that persuade viewers to take specific creative actions, specific kinds of forming, in the

future. This may even illuminate a recent tendency that shows how and where we should be oriented to

the future today.

14 Ibid. p. 46

I do not know for sure but it may be that our epoch has brought with it the upgrading of the

utopian, only it is not called this anymore, it is called science fiction in technology...in which

the “principle of hope” that I have treated with great emphasis plays a role. It begins with the “if

only it were so,” which overtakes the role of reality—something is really so and nothing else.14

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Figure 6

As a prelude I'd like to recapitulate. Hope can be perceived as change in a form over time, and as

extension of past anticipations forming a vector of futurity. As such it orients one to a progression of

realized tendencies occurring between subjects and materials over time, as well as those that have yet

to be realized. The visible machinery of the forms to be discussed here are exceptional examples

because they are models, provisional yet visually coherent propositions for where and how the hoped-

for form can arise, albeit through the turbulence all around it.

In Arthur Ganson's kinetic sculpture Margot's Other Cat (2009) the perception of anticipation as action

and form—truly, a forming—indeed occurs over time. In this work a miniature chair is repeatedly

knocked upward by the force of an equally small cat moving back and forth sideways. (Fig. 6) Viewers

can see the chair lift, spin and fall variously upon impact, appearing to move in random trajectories.

They can also see that the movement of these forms is produced by a system of interconnected parts, a

clunky machine that looks incomplete and provisional. Far from producing agitation, however, the

turbulent quality in this case generates amusement and hope, due into a traceable extension of energy

moving from a small motor into cogs, gears, springs the finally the play of the figures in time. If this is

not a reutilization per se of Fischli & Weiss's contraptions in They Way Things Go (1988) and Rube

Goldberg's contraptions generally speaking, it is certainly a calling out to the optimistic anticipations

that formed the first steam engine, the first wheel and our tedious embrace of technology today. As it is

with Ganson's gadget-like sculptures, the forms reappearing throughout this writing maintain a skinless

appearance that has been absorbed and reformulated into nearly everything created today.

Figure 7

Top  row,  left  to  right:  Tobor  from  Tobor  the  Great  (1954),  Robby  the  Robot  from  Forbidden  Planet  (1956),  B-­‐9  “Robot”  

from  Lost  in  Space  (1965),  Drone  from  Silent  Running,  R2D2  from  Star  Wars  (1977)  Bottom  row:  T800  from  Terminator  

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(1984),  J-­‐5  from  Short  Circuit  (1986),  Battle  Droid  in  Star  Wars:  Episode  One,  The  Phantom  Menace  (1999),  Bumblebee  

from  Transformers  (2007),  WALL-­‐E  from  WALL-­‐E  (2008)  

In 1954 a film called Tobor the Great (Fig. 7) presented a form that was reutilized for the next two

decades. In addition to large metal plates, discrete electrical components, corrugated rubber joints,

vents and jar-like heads, the formation of this robot revealed the foundations of where scientists are

directing their attention to today: modularity, self-assembly and nanotechnology. But from this vantage

point, one can only see that these early machines looked humanoid, and by today's standards, kitschy.

This appearance is in large part due to their plated anatomy that in actuality was a chassis to support

human actors. Yet, as with vehicle designs of this time, the division between bulky containers were

intended to connote that technological complexity could be, and subsequently would have to, look

combined. And like cars, these robots looked manufactured out of recognizable parts, parts users in the

future could recombine, as evidenced by the tinkering Will Robinson or the elderly inventor of Robbie

the Robot in Forbidden Planet. Having priority placed on showing how and why automatons worked

and how they could be changed, eventually led them to become less anatomically human in the

seventies. Though this 'look' returned in the eighties, and to this day the most recognizable robots (the

Terminator and Transformers) appear comparatively skinless with internal mechanisms presented

directly. What can be explained and anticipated through this transition can be gained by observing how

and why spacecraft changed during this time.

Figure 8

Top  row:  Thunderbird  4,  Thunderbirds  (1964-­‐67),  Odyssey  One,  2001:  A  Space  Odyssey  (1968),  Eagle  One,  Space  1999  

(1975-­‐77);  Bottom  Row:  Star  Destroyer,  Star  Wars  (1977),  E.T.'s  spaceship,  E.T.  (1982),Spaceship,  District  9  (2008).  

From 1964 to 1966, Thunderbirds featured marionette and animated toy sized models of futuristic

vehicles. To convey a quality of realism, the fabricated models had a dirt patina applied over their

painted surface to convince the audience they were not toys, but really endured the wear and tear of

space travel. This countered the prevailing trend in spaceship design at the time as polished, stainless

and untouched. Consequently this concern required that the props have an appearance of duration,

enabling them to maintain both the appearance of a model and well worn spacecraft. This quality was

further utilized in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Here viewers were presented many spacecraft, but

the Odyssey One, completely lacking an aerodynamic form, was the primary vessel. This collection of

gray boxes, slanted compartments and spheres (Fig. 8) was a form that effectively reshaped how

spacecraft and complex machines were to be conceptualized in the future. Ironically, this form, and

those that were visibly inspired from it, were originally assembled out of the pieces from Battleship (a

board game), resulting in a compartmentalized gray and 'skinless' appearance. Presenting light-speed

and city-sized vessels with uniformly gray compartments such as in Star Wars (1977) one sees how the

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Surface of the Death Star, Star Wars (1977)

Composed of a multitude of discrete yet similar parts, the creators of these forms compacted actions to

convey an enormous amount of time and energy spent. Presented against the backdrop of the cosmos,

the contrast between the scale of the forms' cumulative durations and the space of immanent

probability for change was heightened. Appearing modular, this forms left the impression that one

could see, and consequently, anticipate the importance of each compartment separately and in unison

as a formation that could adapt to any new circumstance. These slapped together, extremely geometric

15 Modular fluidic and instrumentation components were developed by researchers at the University of Southern

California Viterbi School of Engineering in 2014. The engineers reference the modularity of Lego's as a key inspiration. It's relevant to note that one of the first Lego kits was for rocket ship in 1979, two years after the release of Star Wars. As seen in Figure 8. the similarities in design and proximity towards the films release does not make the following quote seem a coincidence: "If you've grown up to be an engineer or scientist, you've probably been influenced by LEGO® at some point in your childhood. I think every scientist has a secret fantasy that whatever they're building will be as simple to assemble...our concerns are not with bits and symbolic representations, but rather with the way fluidics are routed, combined, mixed, and analyzed; there's no need to stick with continuing to integrate more and more complex devices. We were able to build a working microfluidic system that day, as simple as clicking LEGO® blocks together...”, Science Daily, 2014, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140922152850.htm

future was anticipated to be as interchangeable as Lego blocks.15 (Fig. 9)

Figure 9

16 Synchronous to this aesthetic transition was a 'look' people now attribute to cars, appliances and computers from

the eighties. With nearly trapezoidal 'boxy' exteriors associated with futurity (Delorean DMC-12 1981–82 used in the Back to the Future films) and interior consoles mimicking the lights and grid of fictional control rooms, including the first – though unreliable – touch-sensitive screens (1982 Aston Martin Lagonda), it is hard to discount the creative affects that 'trickled down' from these science fiction films. This sentiment was echoed in 1988: “Devices in the home have developed some related problems: functions and more functions, controls and more controls. I do not think that simple home appliances – stoves, washing machines, audio and television sets – should look like Hollywood's idea of a spaceship control room. They already do, much to the consternation of the consumer who, often as not, has lost (or cannot understand) the instruction manual, so – faced with the bewildering array of controls and displays – simply memorizes one or two fixed settings to approximate what is desired. The whole purpose of the design is lost” Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, Basic Books, New York, 1988, P. 7

spacecraft were so captivating that it became the status quo in ship design for many years, further

becoming the geometric cars16, gadgets and computers of the eighties, et cetera. Googie buildings

became brutalist and sloped appliances became boxy. No longer presenting ships as streamlined

rockets or saucers, or robots with car-like chassis (the irony of Transformers), designers reutilized

forms presented in actual spacecraft, military, and undoubtedly former science-fiction films. These

films presented viewers with how the future was seen to creators of the past and how it could further

become for creators in the future.

Hope was acted out during this time through a consistent compartmentalization of a forms surface,

causing them to appear like frozen implosions to embrace further turbulence. The visible record of

actions comprising these fictional objects created the effect condensing time, slowing its form down

while its mutable, modular formation suggested it was capable of reforming and transforming to adapt

to future contexts quickly. One artist in particular has inverted this implosive quality onto exhibition

spaces, enabling viewers to experience this convoluted state of time as a sensation of weightlessness. In

Peter Kogler's installation Siebdruck auf Papier (1996) at the Secession Building in Vienna, a wallpaper

mesh of pipes crisscross the rooms surface. Absolute control of space appears to be his

intent, but the goal-oriented functionality that the pipes symbolize have no perceivable beginning or

end. This leaves the space appearing as a fragment of a larger unknown whole leaving the viewer to

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feel like a floating, groundless, timeless body in space. Similarly, Computer Animation/Projection (Fig.

10) confronts one with a projected grid of pipes that intermittently convulsed, twisted and panned in

omnidirectional vectors. Disorientated yet captivated viewers embodied a quickly changing space that

seemed to acknowledge no sense of gravity at all. These experiences – while founded on geometric

spacecraft against an 'empty universe' – allows those forms to be lived in as we do our bodies in this

convolution of time and space; a mutability that we can anticipate through disorientation and perceive

in forms.

Figure 10

17 “Peter Kogler’s installations occupy space and make space their topic: the existing exhibition space, the

surrounding space of thought, and the supposed virtual space. If we attempt to examine some of his work of the last few years in the context of the cinematic medium, the genre of science fiction film stands out. It, too, has-if not foremost, then at least latently-an abstract space as its dominant motif: the universe. Since the universe is, for the most part, empty space, in science fiction films greater significance inherently falls to the phenomenon of space than to the action itself. Therefore science fiction films are quite architectural films, even when they lack futuristic architectural models, since every object that appears in them is determined by the surrounding space-a view of things that might (in both directions) just as easily be applied to an exhibition space. If one takes the exhibition space critically, removing it from its profane surroundings and dislodging it entirely from the chaotic pluralism of that outer world, one might compare its outer boundaries with the exterior shell of a spaceship. In both cases the exclusion of unrelated surroundings intensifies, through a kind of implosion, the dynamic of meaning in its interior. If one were to consider the exhibition space itself as surrounding space, within which every artistic statement is constantly forced to produce anew the impression of an interior, literally «importing» the latter(4), then here, too, there are close parallels to the universe in science fiction films.”

Without space helmet this might be difficult, Kathrin Rhomberg, 2000, http://www.kogler.net/essays/%C2%BBwithout-

space-helmet-might-be-difficult%C2%AB-0

The design of the spaceships and space stations, clearly structured in organized, individual

geometric sections, functions as a kind of answer to the inconceivable order of the empty

universe, suggesting control by isolating itself from the latter through its own repetition and

transposition into the available symbolism of an architectural sign language. Peter Kogler’s

spatial installation works on a similar principle. The confusing mesh of pipes likewise seems to

offer, symbolically, an answer to the chaotic pluralism of an exterior space...17

Peter Kogler “Computeranimation/Projektion” at Kunsthaus Bregenz, in 2000, Photo: Markus Tretter

The multiple in these forms (pipes, compartments and exterior modules of all sorts) act as a skin of

turbulence, and what it demonstrates is how – at least in this chronology of forms – a futurity has been

pursued as an ethic. The turbulence required for work-forming (an extension of hope) has been

compacted and intimated here as a unified form. This demonstrated how one can be orientated through

disorientation in order to perceive and create anticipation. This directs one to hopes 'Front' by

witnessing how many unexpected situations that form, or body, confronts, allowing the mutability of

turbulence itself to be seen as a necessary action to allow the movement of hope, its formation, to

'further become.' While the visible exterior of science-fiction's forms were intended to be a high-tech

mess in order to be believable; consistently seeing a state of disorder move as a unitary form against the

backdrop of a turbulent setting extended these forms like blueprints to future creators.

Returning for a moment to Bloch's rhetorical “if only it were so,” today a viewer's response may be: “It

was... How and why did it end?” From this point in history, one can see the skinless appearance of

spaceships and robots inflected from the modularity in architecture, cars and appliances and vice versa,

but this isn’t what we see being created today. What can only be speculated at this time is what

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anticipation (what future) can be perceived, and reutilized, in the self-contained gadgets and spherical

cars populating our home and streets. By observing recent trends in nanotechnology, self-assembly and

the direction fiction is taking towards them, the provisional quality that lends itself to a perceivable

'forming' is being overtly used to present the grounds for another unbecome to emerge. A new kind of

hylozoism is being fostered, an auto-incipience.

Legos

Before a slew of films around 1985, the grandiose spaceships of the past produced a new way of

perceiving everyday mechanisms. But afterwords, the most memorable provisional forms were not

presented flying around space a priori. In Back to the Future, Weird Science and Explorers, discrete

objects were not only seen re-purposed into a form that could potentially do something, but presented a

site where one witnessed a 'forming' mediated more often than not by an adolescent. Throughout the

next several decades, a tendency for creators to show the qualities I have referred to as skinless and

modular were used to demonstrate how a purposeful looking mess, the everyday could further become

(grow up?) over a course of time as a person moved through a space.

Figure 11

Top  to  bottom:  Stills  from  Back  to  the  Future  (1985),  Explorers  (1985),  Weird  Science  (1985)  

In Back to the Future a Delorean, which already resembled a futuristic chimera of past forms, was

reconfigured into a time-machine out of spare parts in garages. In Explorers children re-purpose a

carnival ride into the hull of a spacecraft, heeding directions from alien signals via a jumbled together

communications device; its machinery was again assembled out of spare parts, except now a typical

basement was presented as the scene of innovation. Finally, in Weird Science an actual human being is

seen reconstructed through codes, scanned photos, wire-entwined barbie dolls and a Memotech

MTX512, in a bedroom. (Fig. 9) As opposed to earlier examples, here the turbulent exterior of a form

is seen as a messy room, a junkyard, a garage. At these sites, provisional formations were to be

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demonstrated, and soon it became an action that was expected, anticipated and extended into all matter.

The formations visible in The Lego Movie (2014) echo this forming, but now the everyday has become

everything. Embodying a child, a “Master-Builder” named Emmett was capable of being able to create

anything out of the Lego bricks on-the-spot to solve problems in a wacky context-to-context driven

narrative. The main goal of Emmett was to prevent the Lego world (housed on a worktable in a

basement) from being glued into a highly practical design (instruction-based) the father desired. What

one learns in the end is that it was the child's desire to sustain his fathers ingenuity by causing periods

of disorder. The “mess” the father originally saw was actually a point of departure from how the

original forms were seen. The unexpected appearance produced by the same building blocks inspired

others to perceive a new space of possibility. Unlike the compacted modularity seen in earlier

examples, the formation in this film was the deconstruction of once stagnant forms so that they become

generative, open to 'further become' something new.

Figure 12

“Transformium” in Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

This has precedence interestingly enough in kids movies and popular TV shows, as evidenced in The

Goonies (1985), Batteries Not Included (1987), MacGyver (1985-1992), the booby traps of Home

Alone (1990) and the go-karts of The Little Rascals (1993). But curiously, this trend of auto-formation,

as witnessed in The Lego Movie, is becoming more and more of an anticipated quality in the materials

around us in lieu of advances in nano-technology and environmental awareness. Originating out of the

self-forming T-1000 in Terminator 2 (1992) and the Replicators of Stargate SG-1 (2000) to recent

examples in Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) (Fig. 12), Transcendence (2014), Earth to Echo

(2014), and Big Hero 6 (2014) what is revealed is that a quality of turbulence is expected, and

anticipated out of any and everything as a prelude for creative action, a prelude for form.

The thirty year span separating these periods illuminates how anticipation branched out through the

creation of provisional forms. The vector mapped out here indicates that there is a very different kind

of hope forming today than there was in the seventies. Throughout these examples, one follows a

protagonist through a space and see's how they draw connections between disparate parts and pieces.

The on-the-spot, often capricious decision making of adolescents in the eighties allowed viewers too

see how the formation of not one but many forms could have taken place. The time-machine didn’t

have to be based on a car, it could have been a fridge18. What if the boys in Weird Science had used

live insects instead of barbies? This progression unfolded the compacted form flying around in space

into a field of exploration and cultivation. The anticipations future-engineers witnessed in the

Millennium Falcon as children are witnessed today in matter, rocks, bricks and all, as a fertile

substance: the new stem-cells. Now, as with the Lego Movie, a new material tendency is being

illuminated, endowing it with the potential to produce alternate futures simultaneously; and like Legos,

18 “In the original draft of Back To The Future, Marty McFly worked for Professor Brown, who was a movie

bootlegger and the time machine was a laser device that was housed in a room. In the story’s climax, the device was attached to a refrigerator” http://www.slashfilm.com/how-back-to-the-future-almost-nuked-the-fridge/

29

are subject to be endlessly recombined. As a result, viewers themselves have become mediators of

formation.

Hylozoic has Greek origins; It suggests that life comes out of material things, and it suggests

that there are not strict boundaries between the inter matter of rock, gases or liquids, and living

things. All things are potentiality animate. Although being rooted in mythology, when we look

at recent progress in the science of artificial life and information technology there does seem to

be an increasingly diffused line between organic and inorganic matter.19

Philip Beesley has attuned his practice to this new kind work-forming. Constructing evolving iterations

of responsive environments, a distributed “aggregate” of robotics, chemistry and prototypical

architecture blur the line between sculpture and science fiction. Not simply appearing like a rainforest,

fronds, fibers, bladders and branches filled with protocells, actuators, sensors respond to viewers as a

living space would. Engaging viewers, these forms reach out to be felt, and to feel. Emanating lights,

scents and gesticulating whines, Beesley's recent Sibyl also captures and reacts to the carbon dioxide,

heat, touch, moisture and sounds produced by visitors. Signals are sent from reflexive fronds and lead

up a scaffold of fragile, yet tremendously strong acrylic mesh within which algorithms are programmed

to learn. Responding to viewers with “insect-level-intelligence,” and a growing memory, simple to

complex emergent behavior cause the environment to gently sway and blink, or turbulently shiver, leak

and recoil. Beneath and within the undulating, pulsating mass some viewers feel it is hunting them,

while inviting them to stay and protect them: “You do see a remarkable kind of care with the work –

almost a stewardship emerges within the people. They teach each other to behave.” Beesley, with his

collaborators from MIT, predict this kinetic architecture can become a new, living structure that can 19 Artificially alive artwork tantalizes and surprises, Michael Slezak, 2012,

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2012/07/hylozoic-sydney-bienniale.html www.newscientist.com/blog/culturelab/2012/07/hylozoic-sydny-biennale.html

support us in the future, becoming thin, dense layers that act as walls, fibers and skins that nourish us

as we it.

Figure 13

Philip Beesley, Sibyl (Hylozoic Series) Sydney Biennial, 2012

The futurity of this work, its subsequent evolution, depends on a viewers capacity to perceive a mutual

hope, the 'forming' occurring between them, and a broader anticipation to be tended to between matter

and life. Beesely's work introduces a dialogue between creator, creation and the created, subjecting

viewers to a form that can never be complete, because it is a porous assemblage of matter that is

continuously changing, albeit slowly; a 'forming' not unlike ourselves. What drives this process is the

perception of futurity found in, and future action in dialogue with, a past form's provisional quality.

This is one of the most recent extensions of hope viewers saw in the curiosity of WALL-E, the

reanimated baby robot in Batteries Not Included, the last surviving forest aboard the 'Valley Forge' in

Silent Running (1972), and the chassis of a 1916 aero-engineered prototype Caractacus Potts restored

for his children in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968).

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Conclusion

Throughout this thesis I hoped to provide an introduction to another way of seeing, judging and making

the world around us. Supported by theories that may seem at first to be antithetical, this paper proposes

that the forms populating homes, streets and skies are mutable creations posessing a surplus of hope.

The cross-effect between fiction and reality in the field of science and design is a familiar study. But

what has yet to be fully discussed is why and how, beyond mere practical concerns, these forms (cars,

gadgets, architecture, art etc.) form. And what do they mean? I have attempted to address these

questions by unpacking a theoretical alternative to the way creativity is viewed and applying it to an

index of forms that have once been viewed as futuristic, new and completed, while at the same time

exhibit a quality of the provisional. What those forms and their descendents illuminate is how

anticipation is an action one can perceive as a forming. Contingent on anticipations (hopes) changing

over time, this action occurs when formal aspects of past creations are reutilized, becoming a mixture,

visually and temporally, with those of the present. And the resulting provisional forms extend

anticipations of the former creators, endowing works that appear incomplete and prototypical with a

particularly generative capacity to facilitate new models of futurity and new formings, which can be

seen arising in the past and present.

This is not just about the expectation for an “upcoming model.” This is about the perception of a vector

running through forms which requires the recognition and commencement of creative action: a vector

that orients us to where, when and how our own anticipation is forming. Acknowledging that past

futurities are always yet to be fully recovered through forms, and present futurities can already be felt

arising from the ground swell of turbulence, what cannot be addressed at this time are the ethical and

social implications a new creation must confront. Along with the evolved Tricorder in our pockets and

purses, Beesley work represents just one of many futurities we have the opportunity to foster. Which

makes one wonder which among them we have already allowed to discontinue and which we have

continued to let form.