America's vision of the future circa 1900 brimmed with optimism and a fascination with electricity, blimps, X-rays, socialism and quack cures. But there's more to the story, as pictured in "The Imaginary 20th Century." The interactive installation, on view at the Orange County Museum of Art through April 27, follows a group of neurotic dreamers struggling to cope with the accelerated pace of life unleashed by the period's twin dynamos of science and industry.
To conjure a fantastical history of Gilded Age culture, media artist Andreas Kratky, writer Norman Klein and curator Margo Bistis culled more than 2,000 images from turn-of-the-century postcards, caricatures, cardboard "3-D" illustrations, science fiction, travel guides, Victorian pornography and adventure novels. Kratky says, "We were pretty much all over the place in pulling together the images. The discipline was to avoid high art and go for materials people would have seen daily that would serve as the basis for the way they thought about their own time period and what the future would look like."
