This audiovisual work explores the theme of a future that has not yet arrived. Using materials from advertisements and other products of mass culture from the English-speaking world of the 1980s, we have created an absurdist world filled with loud and aggressive imperatives that assure a safe, pleasant and fashionable future. 

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The current global crisis in international relations, uncertainty in the political future of democratic countries, and the threat of isolationism, dictatorship and populism: all evoke a natural desire to escape to a safe world of simple and reliable solutions, familiar social and cultural frameworks. In contemporary mass culture, this is embodied in the trend for ‘retro’, particularly from the 1970s to the 1990s. 

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Advertising and, more broadly, the information industry create clichéd yet effective images of the master of life and the charming lady, combining control, vitality, respectability, and at the same time, vulgarity, fear of change, and a craving for quick action. In our videos, we compare these clichés with ‘the other’ and the fundamentally alien - spaces of fantasy, the unrecognisable, the uncontrollable, which are also alluring yet dangerous. We bizarrely combine the scary with the magical, the unknown with the reliable and solid. All this is united by the framework of a mandatory investment in the future, no matter how strange and silly, but definitely better than the present. 

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The videos incorporate audio advertisements from the 1980s from the Tyne and Wear Archive, Newcastle. 

The global crisis, the absence of a ‘world gendarme’ (the highest arbiter) and the inability of ‘world powers’ to come to an agreement evoke in the everyday life of the average person a desire for an all-powerful saviour, a Deus ex machina in their consumption of media. In the 2020s, this manifests as nostalgia for the times of ‘Reagan and Thatcher’ alongside periodic resurfacing fears of nuclear war. A particular aspect of these feelings is the anxiety for children. In this video fear, vulnerability and worries about children are humorously and magically resolved through the absurd power of dinosaurs, which became a media brand in the 1980s. 

The space era and the space race, in particular, created in the 1940s-1960s, on a solid state and scientific level, an idea about the possibility of the existence of an extraterrestrial mind. This created a myth about aliens and UFOs in mass consciousness and mass culture. This myth is ambivalent: on the one hand, it is about the highest threat - in particular, on the bodily level - it is an analogue of the fear of being kidnapped or hypnotised. On the other hand, aliens are more advanced than us, which means they are more ethical and wise. These ambivalent feelings are reminiscent of the relationship with violence in general - it is a pendulum between panicky fear and the desire to identify with it as a bearer of power and omnipotence. In this video, aliens are equated to mysterious, attractive and strong strangers or pop idols, who give an unforgettable experience, update your lifestyle and make you smarter and different. 

Nuclear weapons were created during the intense struggle of the great powers of the totalitarian era, world wars, and massive projects. After their initial use, nuclear weapons became tools of intimidation and bargaining, but the fear of nuclear war has haunted humanity for 80 years, giving rise to fantasies of a post-apocalyptic future.

In our video, we combine the horror and power of nuclear weapons, a bureaucratic and technical description of nuclear shelters and a sexually attractive presentation full of hints and temptations. Paradoxically, the most seductive object in the video is neither a body nor a person but the shelter itself, coveted in an age of nuclear threat.

In this way, the various plots of our era - the end of the world, mechanistic care, vague sexual fantasy, and the attractiveness of things, not people - are absurdly combined in one commercial.