Title: Futurama, Autogeddon: Imagining the Superhighway from the World's Fair to the World Wide Web.
Keywords: Futurism; Urban Planning; Cultural Studies; Superhighways; 1939 World's Fair; General Motors; Progress and Technology; Ecological Studies; Post-apocalyptic Science Fiction; Information Superhighway; Media Rhetorics; Metaphor.
Helen J Burgess, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Digital Technology and Culture
Washington State University Vancouver
Jeanne Hamming, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Centenary College of Louisiana
Futurama, Autogeddon is an interdisciplinary, scholarly work in DVD-Rom format that investigates the figure of the superhighway in twentieth-century cultural imagination. Using extensive archival film footage, digital imagery and original video interviews with authors and cultural critics, we argue that the rhetorical construction of the highway has been haunted, first by narratives of promise and progress and then of decay and death. Highways, we show, are figured as technological wonders marking the advent of a better future in the 1939 World's Fair and the advertising campaigns of the 1950s, and then as wired-up networks of death in science fictional accounts from the 60s to the 90s.
At stake in this project is the very status of metaphor in the analysis of technology. The highway is a compelling 20th-century metaphor that reveals anxieties we have about ecology, the cold war, and the individual; as well as a way of imagining infrastructure in an electronic age, in the shape of the "information superhighway." This double haunting, we suggest, highlights the stakes involved in a more abstract, ongoing process: the tension between hierarchical and nodal modes of material and informational organization. The highway, both as a hierarchically-conceived means of transporting goods and people, and a metaphor for the nodal networks of information exchange, can thus be viewed as an artifact which embodies the ongoing restructuring of materials and ideologies inherent in cultural change.
The project will:
Futurama, Autogeddon will be organised into six sections, dealing in roughly chronological order with the changing cultural imagery of the superhighway from 1910 through 1990:
Section One, Modern Times, will present the cultural context of early notions of the superhighway in the twentieth century, from the enthusiastic embracing of technological futurism in art and architecture, through the implementation of those ideals in industry and urban planning. Two films from this era represent the contradictory notions at the heart of modernity: the 1927 documentary film "Wheels of Progress" suggests that, through the medium of improved transportation, technology and progress will save us; while at the same time Charlie Chaplin's popular spoof "Modern Times" (1937), suggests that technology and progress will dehumanise and destroy us.
Section Two, Futurama, will be an in-depth look at Norman Bel Geddes' "Futurama" exhibit, created for the General Motors' pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. This exhibit, which consisted of a scale-model of an idealised America complete with 10,000 model cars moving on ten-lane superhighways, would be influential in forming a public perception of the proposed superhighway system that would last for more than thirty years. The exhibit was documented in GM's film "Highways and Horizons" (1940), which will be used in this section as a primary source for discussing the culture of the Fair and its role in structuring public opinion.
Section Three, Future Perfect, will present archival film and print materials from the 1950s "highway lobby," showing ways in which they build upon and extend the imagery espoused by the creators of Futurama. These materials, we suggest, represent a post-war vision of the future driven by narratives of progress, civic duty and manifest destiny, often commissioned for the purpose of fulfilling and inciting a demand for consumer goods; the imagined future represented in such media suggests a longing for a perfect, utopian future characterized by technological intervention and social engineering. This section will include analyses of highway-propaganda films such as GM's "Key to Our Horizons" (1952) and Dow's "Highway Hearing" (1956), as well as the Populuxe film "Design for Dreaming" (1956).
Section Four, Autogeddon, will examine the switch from narratives of technological progress to those of ecological and social devastation, through an analysis of the postapocalyptic science fiction stories of J. G. Ballard, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ray Bradbury, and Octavia Butler. These stories will be commented on in new video interviews with authors and critics, and placed into cultural context with a discussion of the changing mood of the 1960s and 70s with respect to progress and technological change.
Section Five, Counting the Roadkill, will consider the superhighway from material and ecocritical perspectives in its examination of the hauntology of "roadkill." This section will comment on the conflict that arises when networks of roadways penetrate natural systems. Interviews with cultural critics such as Mike Davis and Evan Eisenberg will inform analyses of roadkill artwork by artists like Jason Rogers as well as provide commentary on highway engineering efforts by the Department of Transportation to accommodate endangered wildlife by creating "critter crossings" and animal "ecoducts." Finally, discussions of roadkill will act as a gateway into more in-depth consideration of the social and ecological consequences of unencumbered technological progress and urban development.
Section Six, Highways of the Mind, will finally discuss the role of metaphor in the narrative construction of the new "information superhighways" of the 1990s and beyond. This section will be constructed around analyses of a range of television, film, and digital media sources which make use of the metaphor of the information superhighway. In this section we suggest that the rhetorics of technological and bodily transcendence so readily applied to Internet culture bear a lot in common with the superhighway narratives from the beginning of the 1900s; an observation which leads us to speculate that characterizations of electronic media will follow the same pattern of narrative from a Futurama of uncritical technological progress to an Autogeddon: a technological/environmental holocaust.
A number of scholarly works in recent years have attempted to take advantage of the popular nature of twentieth century propaganda films and ephemera. Perhaps the most successful of these, Tom Lewis' Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (Viking, 1997) was adapted into a highly acclaimed documentary series by Ken Burns for PBS. Joseph J. Corn's Yesterday's Tomorrows : Past Visions of the American Future (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), a scholarly work but highly accessible to laypersons, has helped spawn the 2003 travelling Smithsonian exhibit of historical imaginations of the future (an exhibit in which two of our authors, Helen Burgess and Jeanne Hamming, will be presenting research this year). A third work, Keller Easterling and Rick Prelinger's pioneering multimedia laserdisc Call It Home: The House That Private Enterprise Built (The Voyager Company, 1992), presents video and ephemeral material from the 1930s through the 1960s to discuss cultural responses to urban planning.
All three of these works' popularity have to do with their success in combining the immediate presentation of cultural materials (in the Burns documentary, film, in Corn's book, visual imagery, and in the Easterling laserdisc, short clips and scanned ephemera) with a skilful critical narrative which places the original materials in context. Like these works, Futurama combines both archival and cultural/critical functions; however the use of high-density DVD-Rom storage allows us to present much more detailed analyses and complete examples of original film footage and visual imagery. DVD-Rom, with its capacious storage, is in this case the most desirable format for delivery of extensive video and critical material in a way that creates both a permanent archive and a critical contribution to the scholarly field of cultural studies. In addition, new video interviews with authors and cultural critics allow Futurama to present a range of opinions from highly qualified experts, thereby taking advantage of the "dialogic" nature of multimedia scholarship identified by Burgess, Hamming and Markley in "The Dialogics of New Media: Video, Visualization, and Narrative in Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars" (Eloquent Images, ed. Kendrick and Hocks, MIT Press, 2003).
While Futurama is a scholarly work intended as a contribution to the field of American/Cultural Studies, the primary market for this DVD-Rom should be considered the generally-educated layperson. Accessibility of both interface and narrative is an issue of current interest to all three authors as we work in the still-nascent field of multimedia content-authoring; we wish to contribute a scholarly work that is accessible for audiences beyond academe.
A secondary market is the use of the DVD-Rom as an assigned textbook for American, Popular Culture and Media Studies courses at the undergraduate level. As an archive of video resources, Futurama will provide unprecedented instant access to culturally significant material for those who are unable to travel to film archives across the country or spend days downloading enormous digitized files. As a critical work, Futurama provides a model for future scholarship in the Humanities, bringing together original material and analyses in a way the printed book has been unable to do in traditional media studies texts.