Green Lantern Gallery

Futurist and sociologist Alvin Toffler warned in his 1970 book Future Shock of a psychological state of overwhelming uncertainty caused by accelerated social and political change. Toffler’s idea was that there was a lag between the rapid pace of environmental and technological development and the ability of individuals and society to change and adapt to them. He offered up this lag not only as a problem, but also as a possibility to see the future and develop a more coherent way to deal with it, seen through the lens of a 1970s loopy apprehensive futurism.

This exhibition looks backwards and forwards at the idea of Future Shock and studies yesterday’s dreams of tomorrow. Today, via telecommunications and the internet, we have even more anxieties about the large amounts of historical information to dig through and a lack of a method for comparing and processing different kinds of information. This exhibition will bring together a group of artists and thinkers who are surveying the information overload of the present and assembling creative libraries that are both functional and impractical to understand how radical countercultural histories and utopian futures exist uncomfortably in the present.