This collection of images is the sign of a very new challenge taken up by Fernando Bryce: the historicisation of our sensibilities and the historicisation of our consumption, in a single sweep of images from five decades that are seen with a simultaneity as exciting as it is astonishing, and that cry out incessantly “Down with History, only more present, and let it be here and now!
The computer culture spread suddenly, even if it has been taking shape over several decades. Its chronology is hardly apprehensible without advertising images to relate it, and these only do so by piling up to add up half a century of domesticity to the size of everyone’s pocketbook, and then embodying the most intense and disturbing democratisation since the KODAK camera with rechargeable film that George Eastman launched to the world in 1888. (Incidentally, thinking à la Hobsbawm, will the 21st century be short or long?) In our imagination, what we now call the Digital Age is 50 years of typographies, keywords, designs and electronic devices – or more precisely, gadgets – that promised to contain in their possible materiality, the palpable form of the future, within a more seductive and seductive illusionism: that of an Autobahn, an instantaneous and limitless information highway. As Steve Jobs did with the Apple Macintosh with mouse (and mouse pad) descended from the heavens.