nomenclature

So I figured I should mention something about the new title of this blog. It comes from my English translation of a Spanish translation of a quote by Sci-Fi Novelist J.G. Ballard, author of the book Crash, adapted to the David Cronenberg film. In Spanish, it reads "El Futuro Será Aburrido" and it was the title for an exhibition at CCCB. I latched onto this phrase mainly because really the future will be boring. Where is my flying car? Where is my hover board? But more seriously, perhaps I identify with this phrase differently than Ballard meant it when he said it, likely because I encountered it decontextualized. I identify in that our futures that actually matter, our foreseeable futures, will be boring. We will keep going to work, keep driving our same cars, keep going to the same stores, eating the same things, seeing the same buildings walking to our homes, the list goes on. But I feel this may be where the power of photography lies, and I know there is nothing radically new in this statement but I feel it dovetails nicely with the Ballard quote, photography allows us to radically reimagine the spaces we inhabit on a daily basis and gives us the tools to elevate the banal to the academic and artful.

"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again ... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul."
-J.G. Ballard, Interview