Back To the Future
The word “neon” comes from the Greek “Νέον,” which translates as “new one.” Growing up in the 80s, neon will always have a nostalgic, iconic quality to me, associated with visions of "the future" which saturated popular culture at that time. This projected future would be a post-millenial, capitalist utopia of technology-enhanced living.
I developed this project while working in Germany for a few months earlier this year. Perhaps due to its wartime history, Germany seemed to me a country that has and continues to be particularly devoted to re-imagining its own future. It does this with one eye on the past.
These images originate in Dusseldorf, an industrial center that became symbolic of a new German postwar modernity, represented by clean, modern design. Dusseldorf was also the birthplace of electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk, and their particular brand of conceptual futurism; man reborn as a fusion of man & machine. A “victory of the modernizing present over the past.”
Light can be a catalyst for narrative events and social encounters. The benches pictured here are a permanent public installation in Dusseldorf's Hofgarten. I liken them to modern fires; a meeting point around which people would gather every night the weather was clear. They huddled; warming themselves and rubbing elbows with the social world.
At the intersections of history and the future, we can find ourselves here, right now.
