Catalogue Number
NMLH.2023.69.12
Object Name
Poster
Title
Future Fictions
Date
1972-1982
Description
The Poster Collective was a collective formed in 1971 at the Slade School of Art,  a group formed to initially produce posters in response to the miners strike and on the wars in both Vietnam and Ireland. It was formed on the basis of developing a coherent visual style, which addressed the political issues of the time. This included the armed struggles against colonialism in Africa, the struggle of women for equal rights and the continuing struggle against racism. The collective was active in the 70's and 80's, producing posters on a wide range of issues, including for educational purposes. The group was not-for-profit and used a variety of hand-printing techniques to create their posters. This poster is part of a set, 'Future Fictions', produced when the collective moved to the North London Polytechnic is a set of posters reflecting on technological development and leads us to address environmental issues of today. This is the final 'future fictions' poster and is titled future
fictions. There is an image of a sun with long red rays - there is an image of a black and white computer monitor. On the monitor it says "I see battlefields on which we can destroy anything we can locate through instant communications and almost instantaneous application of highly lethal firepower." Underneath this there is another black and white image of a remote controll, with a hand clasping it. The remote control has buttons and text which says 'Remote Control Unit.' There is orange text on a dark brown background which says "We live in a world that is increasingly press-button. Yet at the same time the underlying sensation of the culture is that of loss of control. As visions of a Post-Industrial world in which a new Fifth Generation of computers transform the boundaries of artificial intelligence the gap between what is reality and what is fiction appears ever more tenuous. The Technocratic offers no other possibility except 'going with' it's plans for the ever accelerating
development of the mega-machine. In the words of Lewis Mumford without the "myth of the machine,...the gates on the technocratic prison will open automatically despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.'
