The future does not exist: Retrotypes

The authors of this book offer a different reading of the retro-futurist phenomena from a simple intuition: the future only exists through countless futures that are carried by passed times, and particularly by our close modernity, which might have tried with more intensity than any other to take in charge its future. The History is truly fuller than we imagine. The futures of the past, unrealized, insist at the heart of our time, drawing with the active futurity’s lines many parallel stories. Do these futures exist less than the others? Why not confer to them an ontological dignity to those of the present’s futures?Blithely going through the more diverse domains (film, art, literature, architecture), the book develops his main hypothesis by exploring in a recreational way the forms of a “floating” time, mixed up with virtual futures, in a constant back-and-forth between concepts and figures. To drag the future life’s dreamed scenes out of the limbo of the past, Alain Bubblex used “retrotypes”: small-sized photographs and scanned documents, brief plans made in vector; their approximate precision makes them similar to the light vignette of decalcomania.