It had to happen eventually.
In September 2009, I noticed that a modern smartphone or PDA of some sort had somehow ended up in a photo on the cover of the 1960 French edition of Chester Himes’ Imbroglio negro (All Shot Up). So I posted my discovery to HiLobrow.
After that, without even looking for them, I found anachronistic smartphones/PDAs in two pre-1950s films — Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) and Frank Capra’s Platinum Blonde (1931).
My discovery of these time-traveling devices has obviously inspired San Francisco-based artist Alex Varanese, who recently unveiled “ALT/1977: WE ARE NOT TIME TRAVELERS,” a series of images in which he imagines how an mp3 player, a laptop, a mobile phone, and a handheld video game system would have been designed — and advertised — if they’d been invented in 1977.
(Happy Video Games Day, today.)
It’s a fun conceit, and it’s brilliantly executed. I particularly enjoy the sly shout-out to yours truly in Varanese’s rendering of the MobileVoxx…
What an honor!
Joshua Glenn is an editor, publisher, and a freelance writer and semiologist. He does business as KING MIXER, LLC.
He's cofounder of the websites
HiLobrow,
Significant Objects, and
Semionaut; and cofounder of
HiLoBooks, which will reissue six Radium Age sci fi novels in 2012. In 2011, he produced and co-designed the
iPhone app KER-PUNCH. He's coauthored and co-edited
Taking Things Seriously,
The Idler's Glossary,
The Wage Slave's Glossary, the story collection
Significant Objects (forthcoming from Fantagraphics), and Unbored, a kids' field guide to life forthcoming from Bloomsbury.
In the '00s, Glenn was an associate editor and columnist at the
Boston Globe's IDEAS section; he also started the IDEAS blog
Brainiac. He has written for
Slate,
n+1,
Cabinet,
io9,
The Baffler,
Feed, and
The Idler.
In the '90s, Glenn published the seminal intellectual zine
Hermenaut; served as editorial director and co-producer of the pioneering DIY and online social networking website Tripod.com; and was an editor at the magazine
Utne Reader.
Glenn manages the
Hermenautic Circle, a secretive online community. He was born and raised in Boston, where he lives with his wife and sons.
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