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Syd Mead Is Not Science Fiction
There’s a routine, but profoundly telling moment when many visitors complete their first walkthrough at Future Pastime, the exhibition of paintings by the visionary artist and visual futurist Syd Mead currently on display in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
“His outlook on the future is so positive.
I thought Syd Mead was dystopian,” many attendees exclaim, as if on cue.
Space Wheel Interior (1979)
This perception is heavily guided by the work that—-for many—is the single most widely known reference point for Mead’s impact as a visual futurist: Director Ridley Scott’s 1982 rain soaked, techno-dystopian masterpiece, Blade Runner, whose visual landscape was largely Mead’s creation.
In Blade Runner, Mead’s dystopian Los Angeles is so sleek, so complex, so rich with detail, one cannot blame audience members for confusing him with being a master of the morose.
However, to quote Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve (and another Mead collaborator): “[Syd] traveled in dystopia only once, and it was because of Ridley Scott.
Syd’s first drawings of Los Angeles for Blade Runner were pure, bright and peaceful, but Ridley wanted his new world to be more claustrophobic and oppressive.
And Syd dived into the darkness.”
One would reasonably expect Mead, with his fluent visual language of darkness so ably on display in Blade Runner, to be a committed future-cynic.
However, it was quite the opposite.
Mead was, in Vileneuve’s words, “one of the last great utopians,” a tidbit often lost on audiences raised on a steady diet of apocalyptic scenarios, dismal futures, and collapsed civilizations—the same narrative requests made often by Mead’s commissioning directors.
In fact, Mead’s output outside the world of cinema—which in fact represents the lionshare of his more than 65-year professional career—is a replete and uniform world of robust optimism and hopeful aspiration.
The future of Syd Mead is a bright and gilded one; the fulfillment of our greatest hopes and aspirations.
It exists on the distant end of realism, yet is still somehow within reach.
The son of a Baptist minister (and part time art teacher), Mead gathered the strands of a childhood crowded by poverty and increasing world strife and instead formulated a unique worldview and artistic direction that was irrepressibly optimistic, often in spite of (and in stark contrast to) the current affairs and fortunes of the time.
To Mead, the prospect of an optimistic future was not a question of chance but of preparation.
“Why wouldn’t you rehearse for a good future?” he often said.
“I think that we should celebrate and rehearse for a bright future, and maybe it will come true.
I don’t have time to illustrate misery or dystopian scenarios because they’ll happen.
If you let everything go, they’ll happen anyway.”
This outlook was successfully channeled into a singular career as an industrial futurist, becoming one of a rare group of individuals kept on speed dial by titans of industry to predict and illuminate likely future outcomes across myriad disciplines: architecture, urban planning, engineering, automotive, aeronautics, mass transit, spaceflight, technology, innovation, consumer goods, media, and more.
Mead took it a step further by assuming the mantle of “visual futurist,” delivering his results not in research papers or dissertations, but via vivid, dynamic artworks, most principally paintings in his medium of choice: gouache.
Running of the 200th Kentucky Derby (1975)
What he never anticipated was that the language of his industrial forecasting work would escape its enclosure and go on to define the visual identity of modern science fiction storytelling and cinematic futurism.
Mead entered professional life with nary a thought nor desire to work in the movies.
In fact, movies were banned in the Mead household until he was 13 years old, with his earlier years filled with a potent mixture of his father’s chief obsessions: end-times religion, study and practice of painting and fine arts, and the pulp science fiction adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon (which Kenneth, his father, would buy family friendly editions so they could read together).
Syd’s personal contributions to this percolating artistic concoction—an obsession with automobiles, the vibrant creations of contemporary illustrators as diverse as Maxfield Parrish and Chesley Bonestell, and the constant desire to innovate and improve one’s artistic craft—provided the ingredients to a simmering brew that one day would synthesize into the poetic future seer we celebrate today.
By his mid-teens, Mead distanced himself from the old time religion of his parents as a new devotion emerged:bright future.
The works of his adolescence and early adulthood burst with an almost unbridled gusto of color and life as potential futures were considered.
Cowboys draped in pastel tour rural ranch grounds on horseback and bi-copter.
Flying transport, early prototypes of Blade Runner-esque vehicles to come, twenty five years before the fact, are wrapped in chrome and almost seem to lift off the page.
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After his 1959 graduation from the Art Center in Los Angeles where he majored in industrial design, word quickly spread of this young man with a “future touch:” the uncanny ability to conceptualize and render achievable futures with the dexterity of an industrial engineer, the functionality of a city planner, and the poetry of a master painter.
His first post-college berth at Ford’s Advanced Car Styling studio—where he worked on futuristic concept cars like the Gyron—lasted all of 26 months.
The “thinness of purpose” got to him, he said.
“If the company decided to stop making cars and start making washing machines next week, the process would not change at all—you just start doing sketches of washing machines.”
Mead departed Ford in 1961, and it was a providential overture made by industrial giant U.S.
Steel shortly prior that which truly set the stage for the budding visual futurist to prove his worth.
Aluminum, both lighter and cheaper, had been steadily eating into U.S.
Steel’s profits, as well as the public’s romance with the once iconic alloy.
The task for Mead was clear: to portray steel as a material of the future.
Fifty years.
One hundred years.
Beyond.
To make it relevant again today by showcasing its dreamy successes of tomorrow.
It was the assignment he had been practicing for his whole life, and Mead did not disappoint.
Essentially given carte blanche, he remarkably completed the entire book—text and images—in just 30 days.
While first intended as a product marketing catalogue aimed squarely at U.S.
Steel customers, clients, and manufacturing partners, his work was such a sensation that the company commissioned four more books through 1969, and expanded the distribution of the volumes, running adverts for free copies in young people’s magazines, and seeding editions to all of the major art and design schools across the country.
The result was the 1960s equivalent of a viral sensation; the books “went horizontal through the design community,” as Syd put it himself.
Blossoming directors, designers, technologists, and innovators sought out the books and cherished them as cult objects.
Sacred windows into the future of both technology and design.
Acclaimed genre director Joe Johnston, who cut his teeth as art director on the original Star Wars
Wheeless Truck (1969)
As a result, the “Syd Mead look” is all over Star Wars, very specifically in the case of the AT-ATs, the iconic tall legged imperial transports featured in The Empire Strikes Back, which were derived by Johnston and the Lucasfilm team directly from Mead’s “Wheelless Truck”
Despite his overwhelming influence on the series, Mead was not involved directly in Star Wars.
He wasn’t even asked.
It’s an understandable oversight.
The concept of calling up Syd Mead in 1975 (by then an acclaimed industrial designer and futurist) to work on a motion picture is equivalent to asking Zaha Hadid in her prime to design buildings for an episode of Dynasty.
Requests like these were simply not made, and as the 20th anniversary of Syd Mead’s professional career approached, he had yet to work on a single motion picture, let alone even be asked.
This all changed when a fortuitous thought entered the mind of Star Wars VFX director John Dykstra in early 1979.
Dykstra, who had attended Long Beach State alongside Johnston, and maintained a personal collection of Mead’s U.S.
Steel books, now found himself as the visual effects lead on Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
With the design of the film’s central antagonist—a leviathan entity of “unimaginable scale” named V’ger—suddenly in jeopardy, Dykstra took a leap of faith and reached out to Mead, uttering 12 words that would change both film and futurism forever:
“Syd, would you like to work on a science fiction motion picture?”
Syd replied, “Sure.”
In this one moment, the circuit was completed, and the board lit up.
Suddenly alerted to the fact that their favorite futurist was down to do film, the entire town pivoted to Mead in unison.
Ridley Scott, Steven Lisberger, Peter Hyams, James Cameron, and John Badham all reached out in quick succession.
By 1986, via Blade Runner, Tron, 2010, Aliens, and Short Circuit, the very aesthetic of science fiction was altered forever… not by the hand of an imaginative production designer, but an actual futurist trained on developing real world futures to be built.
Elon Solo is the co-curator of Syd Mead: Future Pastime, an exhibition exploring the original artwork of Syd Mead, currently on display in NYC through May 21.
City on Wheels (1969)
Source: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/syd-mead-is-not-science-fiction/" style="color: #0066cc;">https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/syd-mead-is-not-science-fiction/
#syd #mead #not #science #fiction
Syd Mead Is Not Science Fiction
There’s a routine, but profoundly telling moment when many visitors complete their first walkthrough at Future Pastime, the exhibition of paintings by the visionary artist and visual futurist Syd Mead currently on display in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
“His outlook on the future is so positive.
I thought Syd Mead was dystopian,” many attendees exclaim, as if on cue.
Space Wheel Interior (1979)
This perception is heavily guided by the work that—-for many—is the single most widely known reference point for Mead’s impact as a visual futurist: Director Ridley Scott’s 1982 rain soaked, techno-dystopian masterpiece, Blade Runner, whose visual landscape was largely Mead’s creation.
In Blade Runner, Mead’s dystopian Los Angeles is so sleek, so complex, so rich with detail, one cannot blame audience members for confusing him with being a master of the morose.
However, to quote Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve (and another Mead collaborator): “[Syd] traveled in dystopia only once, and it was because of Ridley Scott.
Syd’s first drawings of Los Angeles for Blade Runner were pure, bright and peaceful, but Ridley wanted his new world to be more claustrophobic and oppressive.
And Syd dived into the darkness.”
One would reasonably expect Mead, with his fluent visual language of darkness so ably on display in Blade Runner, to be a committed future-cynic.
However, it was quite the opposite.
Mead was, in Vileneuve’s words, “one of the last great utopians,” a tidbit often lost on audiences raised on a steady diet of apocalyptic scenarios, dismal futures, and collapsed civilizations—the same narrative requests made often by Mead’s commissioning directors.
In fact, Mead’s output outside the world of cinema—which in fact represents the lionshare of his more than 65-year professional career—is a replete and uniform world of robust optimism and hopeful aspiration.
The future of Syd Mead is a bright and gilded one; the fulfillment of our greatest hopes and aspirations.
It exists on the distant end of realism, yet is still somehow within reach.
The son of a Baptist minister (and part time art teacher), Mead gathered the strands of a childhood crowded by poverty and increasing world strife and instead formulated a unique worldview and artistic direction that was irrepressibly optimistic, often in spite of (and in stark contrast to) the current affairs and fortunes of the time.
To Mead, the prospect of an optimistic future was not a question of chance but of preparation.
“Why wouldn’t you rehearse for a good future?” he often said.
“I think that we should celebrate and rehearse for a bright future, and maybe it will come true.
I don’t have time to illustrate misery or dystopian scenarios because they’ll happen.
If you let everything go, they’ll happen anyway.”
This outlook was successfully channeled into a singular career as an industrial futurist, becoming one of a rare group of individuals kept on speed dial by titans of industry to predict and illuminate likely future outcomes across myriad disciplines: architecture, urban planning, engineering, automotive, aeronautics, mass transit, spaceflight, technology, innovation, consumer goods, media, and more.
Mead took it a step further by assuming the mantle of “visual futurist,” delivering his results not in research papers or dissertations, but via vivid, dynamic artworks, most principally paintings in his medium of choice: gouache.
Running of the 200th Kentucky Derby (1975)
What he never anticipated was that the language of his industrial forecasting work would escape its enclosure and go on to define the visual identity of modern science fiction storytelling and cinematic futurism.
Mead entered professional life with nary a thought nor desire to work in the movies.
In fact, movies were banned in the Mead household until he was 13 years old, with his earlier years filled with a potent mixture of his father’s chief obsessions: end-times religion, study and practice of painting and fine arts, and the pulp science fiction adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon (which Kenneth, his father, would buy family friendly editions so they could read together).
Syd’s personal contributions to this percolating artistic concoction—an obsession with automobiles, the vibrant creations of contemporary illustrators as diverse as Maxfield Parrish and Chesley Bonestell, and the constant desire to innovate and improve one’s artistic craft—provided the ingredients to a simmering brew that one day would synthesize into the poetic future seer we celebrate today.
By his mid-teens, Mead distanced himself from the old time religion of his parents as a new devotion emerged:bright future.
The works of his adolescence and early adulthood burst with an almost unbridled gusto of color and life as potential futures were considered.
Cowboys draped in pastel tour rural ranch grounds on horseback and bi-copter.
Flying transport, early prototypes of Blade Runner-esque vehicles to come, twenty five years before the fact, are wrapped in chrome and almost seem to lift off the page.
Join our mailing list
Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!
After his 1959 graduation from the Art Center in Los Angeles where he majored in industrial design, word quickly spread of this young man with a “future touch:” the uncanny ability to conceptualize and render achievable futures with the dexterity of an industrial engineer, the functionality of a city planner, and the poetry of a master painter.
His first post-college berth at Ford’s Advanced Car Styling studio—where he worked on futuristic concept cars like the Gyron—lasted all of 26 months.
The “thinness of purpose” got to him, he said.
“If the company decided to stop making cars and start making washing machines next week, the process would not change at all—you just start doing sketches of washing machines.”
Mead departed Ford in 1961, and it was a providential overture made by industrial giant U.S.
Steel shortly prior that which truly set the stage for the budding visual futurist to prove his worth.
Aluminum, both lighter and cheaper, had been steadily eating into U.S.
Steel’s profits, as well as the public’s romance with the once iconic alloy.
The task for Mead was clear: to portray steel as a material of the future.
Fifty years.
One hundred years.
Beyond.
To make it relevant again today by showcasing its dreamy successes of tomorrow.
It was the assignment he had been practicing for his whole life, and Mead did not disappoint.
Essentially given carte blanche, he remarkably completed the entire book—text and images—in just 30 days.
While first intended as a product marketing catalogue aimed squarely at U.S.
Steel customers, clients, and manufacturing partners, his work was such a sensation that the company commissioned four more books through 1969, and expanded the distribution of the volumes, running adverts for free copies in young people’s magazines, and seeding editions to all of the major art and design schools across the country.
The result was the 1960s equivalent of a viral sensation; the books “went horizontal through the design community,” as Syd put it himself.
Blossoming directors, designers, technologists, and innovators sought out the books and cherished them as cult objects.
Sacred windows into the future of both technology and design.
Acclaimed genre director Joe Johnston, who cut his teeth as art director on the original Star Wars
Wheeless Truck (1969)
As a result, the “Syd Mead look” is all over Star Wars, very specifically in the case of the AT-ATs, the iconic tall legged imperial transports featured in The Empire Strikes Back, which were derived by Johnston and the Lucasfilm team directly from Mead’s “Wheelless Truck”
Despite his overwhelming influence on the series, Mead was not involved directly in Star Wars.
He wasn’t even asked.
It’s an understandable oversight.
The concept of calling up Syd Mead in 1975 (by then an acclaimed industrial designer and futurist) to work on a motion picture is equivalent to asking Zaha Hadid in her prime to design buildings for an episode of Dynasty.
Requests like these were simply not made, and as the 20th anniversary of Syd Mead’s professional career approached, he had yet to work on a single motion picture, let alone even be asked.
This all changed when a fortuitous thought entered the mind of Star Wars VFX director John Dykstra in early 1979.
Dykstra, who had attended Long Beach State alongside Johnston, and maintained a personal collection of Mead’s U.S.
Steel books, now found himself as the visual effects lead on Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
With the design of the film’s central antagonist—a leviathan entity of “unimaginable scale” named V’ger—suddenly in jeopardy, Dykstra took a leap of faith and reached out to Mead, uttering 12 words that would change both film and futurism forever:
“Syd, would you like to work on a science fiction motion picture?”
Syd replied, “Sure.”
In this one moment, the circuit was completed, and the board lit up.
Suddenly alerted to the fact that their favorite futurist was down to do film, the entire town pivoted to Mead in unison.
Ridley Scott, Steven Lisberger, Peter Hyams, James Cameron, and John Badham all reached out in quick succession.
By 1986, via Blade Runner, Tron, 2010, Aliens, and Short Circuit, the very aesthetic of science fiction was altered forever… not by the hand of an imaginative production designer, but an actual futurist trained on developing real world futures to be built.
Elon Solo is the co-curator of Syd Mead: Future Pastime, an exhibition exploring the original artwork of Syd Mead, currently on display in NYC through May 21.
City on Wheels (1969)
Source: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/syd-mead-is-not-science-fiction/
#syd #mead #not #science #fiction
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