Whe human face after biting into a lemon, earthly nature contracts because many things taste sour: concrete, glass, steel, plastic, residential buildings, factories, server parks, vehicles, multi-storey car parks, malls, refineries, pipelines, nuclear reactors, but also wind turbines and heat pumps. Countless species perish. If people come to terms with this, the only thing left for them to do in the future is the interior design of the run-down dwelling. Then she should at least orientate herself on Syd Mead, so that it looks like something. Mead was an American industrial designer and film decor specialist, born in 1933 and died in 2017. From the classic first “Star Trek” film in 1979 to Ridley Scott’s android passion play “Blade Runner” in 1982 (and the sequel “Blade Runner 2049” by Denis Villeneuve, which was released in cinemas in 2017) to the robot string “Short Circuit” (German as “Number 5 lives”) from 1987, Mead’s realm of backgrounds, dioramas, vehicle parks and antenna forests, where the neon lights never go out. If one day there are no more cars on the streets, descendants will recognize from Mead’s designs what the idea “car” must have meant.
The visions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are arguably more interesting than the realities of these centuries; It’s such an epoch. They already dominate the image of time: We read speculatively, stream imaginary worlds, throw them onto screens, and if we want to walk around in them, we visit amusement parks. The artificial intelligence that we model in our image will not take it any differently – like in the “Murderbot” stories by the American author Martha Wells, where a construct that can think and feel, whenever it doesn’t kill or someone who has to guard, drops into “my media”, that is, into endless serial consumption, to wash off the greasy, bloody or stinky facts: “I don’t like anything that I can’t download,” thinks the machine.
