Techno Aesthetics and Retro-futurism

The father of the Atomic Bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, had a phrase for a succinct an efficient engineering solution, he called it ‘Technically Sweet’. He went on to explain that whilst making the first nuclear bomb at Los Alamos during World War II, his team of scientists and engineers were driven not only by a desire to beat the Germans, but also in part by the intellectual challenges of the immensely difficult task before them. Later, however he and other members of his team came to regret their success and the new Atomic world they had created. More recently Benjamin Sims of The Los Alamos National Laboratory, suggested that the banning of above ground nuclear testing alienated weapons designers from both the terrors and the aesthetic pleasures of nuclear weapons!

So the challenge of Nuclear Bomb designing, (and a good wage I’m sure), can be a source of aesthetic pleasure to their makers, and can drive intelligent people to behaviour we would considered extremely dangerous.
If the scientists themselves can be driven forward into areas they may later come to regret, where does this leave our understanding of the value of aesthetics as it appears in the different fields of scientific endeavour? If we can be driven on by the aesthetic challenge, past the point of understanding the intrinsic worth of our actions.

How then are we to assess the worth of technical ‘improvements’ of the past 60 years? Especially if some of those that had a hand in the manufacture can hold doubts about their value to us?

Marshall McLuhan states in ‘The Medium is the Message’ that a technology is improved in incremental steps until it ‘flips’ into another purpose altogether, the mobile phone being a prime example. It has changed from a useful tool for the delivery of information into the actual content of the information in itself.

Retro-futurism is an attempt to underline the real worth to modernity of the recent past by finding the point of divergence where the old value of aesthetics fell away from the current path.

This process is important because we must not make choices about the present using hazy assumptions about the past. It gives us insight and clues into understanding the true value of the present, and is perhaps a counter-movement to the relentless marketing and spin of our time.

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