Origins of the retrofuturist
In 2019, I wrote a reflective narrative about the origins of the Shared Understanding concept, which was a synthesis of several apparently unrelated ideas: reimagining Piagetian thought, valuing an antique children’s encyclopedia, tinkering in The Exploratorium museum, critiquing 90s internet culture, musing a Flaming Lips song lyric, reverberating a simulatory animation device called the zoetrope and illuminating the unknown gaps in-between…
Five years later, Shared Understanding has grown substantially, continuing to evolve in theory and practice, and is now more clearly and robustly defined in the much anticipated Elgar Encyclopedia of Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity. Considering reading antique encyclopedias was an unusual pastime of mine since I was very young, it is such a delightful honor to be invited to join an international community of over one hundred distinguished scholars and thinkers featured in this Encyclopedia, which in my opinion exemplifies retrofuturism or the renaissance ethos that often goes astray in our increasingly technological universe.
In the lead up to the book’s release in June 2024, I am revisiting the reflective piece which eventually became the Prologue to my book Producing Shared Understanding (2020):
The first time I ever saw a live and spinning zoetrope—a pre-cinematic animation device—was on a visit to the Exploratorium Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception on San Francisco’s Pier 15, in March 2017. Derived from the Greek words zoe, meaning “life”, and tropos meaning “turning”, a zoetrope is also known as a “wheel of life”.
This was my first “live” zoetrope experience because as a child I had seen a static zoetrope in a detailed, illustrated entry about how motion pictures were made, in a leather-bound antique encyclopedia volume by Arthur Mee. As Mee’s encyclopedias for children were published in mid-twentieth-century Europe, it is likely that I am in the minority of millennials who have ever heard of Mee’s encyclopedia. I remember being fascinated by countless entries that naturally unified the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts, spanning across several volumes.
Most school teachers said that the information held in those books was quite archaic, and that I should have consulted the latest Britannica CD- ROM or even the pre-Google search engine AltaVista in the mid-1990s wave of the World Wide Web. But browsing these newer resources felt mechanical and limited. They were devoid of the fusing of ethical and humanist wisdom and wonder, alongside scientific proofs.
Over knowing what we know, these classical texts inspired us to place even higher value in being curious about what we do not know. Arthur Mee was honest about his encyclopedia; although it was very thorough, carefully presented and detailed, he made it clear to learning minds that it was not the fountain of all knowledge once devoured. The real magic was found in the unknown gaps in-between. Like the zoetrope, only through the illuminated gaps in the wheel did the whole story come to life.
If I had been more deliberate and orderly in my early research, I might never have randomly come across the zoetrope, as both an innovative concept and a precursor invention which ultimately led to traditional audiovisual motion picture and—as we know and love it today—digital multimedia and animation, social media, GIFs, memes, live streaming on reddit’s Public Access Network, YouTube, cat videos and Pixar.
A zoetrope is also known as a “wheel of life”. An illusion. A simulation. Is digital life an illusion? Is reality a simulation? Is simulation a reality?
You realize the sun doesn’t go down it’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round—The Flaming Lips “Do You Realize?”
Also inside the Exploratorium that day, there was a sign in the Tinkering Studio.
A quote from Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget in the early 1970s, when transdisciplinary thinking was just taking flight:
To understand is to invent.
Quotes such as this reflect the assumptions prior to the Artificial Age—that the social or environmental impact of any invention was a primary consideration before unleashing it onto the universe. Now it appears to be the opposite. The concept of the Anthropocene is driven by technocratic narratives—both utopian and dystopian—but not all of its solutions will be technological ones. Furthermore, tech solutions to tech problems seem paradoxical. We need to make sure that the problem is not compounded by the “solution”.
Somewhere—in the mix of watching zoetropes live, thinking about Piaget’s thoughts and exploring a very hands-on museum, lighting up our imaginations—came the first sparks of this book.
To share understanding is to reinvent.