I Have Seen the Future (2024) – Jasper de Beijer

‘I Have Seen the Future’ is based on the Futurama presentation by the automobile company General Motors during the World’s Fair in New York in 1939. Here, the company presented a massive model of a landscape depicting how the United States could look in the future. The model showcased a future world where humanity would have unlimited access to natural resources and complete control over nature.

During the World’s Fair in 1964, a new scale model was presented that was even more exotic and ambitious than the previous one: humans would colonize the moon, explore the deep sea, and create machines that could autonomously build highways in the jungle. In reality, the feasibility of shaping the world turned out differently then expected. It proved to be a utopia, with past visions of the future characterized by manic wishful thinking combined with a painful lack of realism.

The fictional world in ‘Have Seen the Future’ is one in which the inhabitants are trapped between different visions of the future and reality. These people strive to preserve the illusion at all costs while trying to force reality to resemble their dreams. During this process, they shatter their own reality to reshape their envisioned future, ultimately placing that future in the past. As a result, they are always one step behind, entirely fixated on perpetually creating a new version of the future.

In this project Jasper de Beijer (1973) explores the optimism with which he grew up in the 1970’s and how both he and the world around him increasingly realized that the idea of making the world as they wished was ill-suited to reality. By recreating the escapism of the 1970s, the artist positions himself as someone imposing his subjective vision on reality. This creates a tension where reality must yield to utopian thinking, even though that same utopia proves unworkable in reality.