By Cara Smulevitz

Through Oct. 11 at Gallery 2

It’s the turn of the third millennium, and our generation, being thoroughly versed (if not partially based) on nostalgic images, is very aware of what an America of fifty or one hundred years ago had imagined for its future. So how do we measure up? In some ways, it looks like we’re a little bit behind on living up to our predecessors’ fantasies. For one, we still haven’t managed those fantastically convenient Jetsons cars that fold up into briefcases — and the hopes of an entire generation of Star Wars-influenced children are dashed, Christmas after Christmas, upon failing to receive a rocket-pack or deferential robot playmate. It is the generations bred on those fantasies, we grown-up children still pissed off about having failed to receive said rocket-pack, to whom Anti-Spacesuit: The Dirty Future is addressed.

The exhibition, which runs through October 11 at Gallery 2, explores the past’s visions of the future, and that future’s visions of itself. This is no small topic, and given its open-endedness, the show is surprisingly cohesive. The artworks in the exhibition seem, with few exceptions, to fall into two distinct categories: those that employed a kitsch sensibility to draw attention to the shoddy and trite in our culture’s visions for the future, and those that embraced and celebrated the peculiar aesthetics associated with those visions.

Of that first type, Chris Reilly’s “MegaBot 85,000,” a playfully sloppy robot built from scraps, stands out. The MegaBot is goofy, awkward, and obviously useless, speaking to the disappointment of many in facing the sad fact that the year 2003 has not become all that science fiction had promised. This robot will not be bringing anyone breakfast in bed any time soon, and I, for one, am pretty mad about it. But the MegaBot is endearing — it stands kind of stupidly in the gallery space, it seems helpless and ungainly — a demeanor that soothes the jilted robot-wanter in all of us, and assures us that technology, with its often sinister face, can be manageable, and even likeable.

Sarah Ludy’s very charming animated short seems to operate along similar lines. The work, “The Future of Tomorrow — Today,” is beautifully crafted to approximate the sort of jumpiness of early animation, which gives it a starting point steeped in nostalgia. Ludy’s characters are extra-terrestrial, but not alien, just as the narrative being played out is mysterious, but not remote. Like Reilly’s MegaBot, Ludy’s space-people are likeable and winning, using the conventions of the past to ground the idea of the future in a wholly benign, manageable present.

Of the works that chose to exploit the compelling aesthetic associated with science-fiction film from the late seventies and early eighties, Kelley Schei’s “Uniform” is exemplary. The sort of Tron look — slick, clean, and remote — is synthesized in “Uniform,” a simple, well-constructed suede coat that epitomizes, both in its extreme whiteness and its machined, untouched quality, the kind of military frostiness and efficiency that so often colored 1970s visions of future architecture and fashion. Sabine Gruffat’s series of three video stills, which beg for a narrative and then staunchly refuse to offer one, seem to exploit that aesthetic as well, their extreme polish and impenetrable content rendering them distant and cold in a way that clearly calls up a particular, but hard-to-pin-down quality characteristic of late ’70s fantasies of the future.

The show’s two most successful works, Ignacio Mardones’ “A Delicate Complex,” and Beate Engl’s “Space is the Place Vol. 2,” address not the past’s visions of the future, but the futuristic nature of the present. Both are interactive and web-based, and present the technologies that characterize our age in a way that highlights their inherent remoteness, the strangeness that we so often forget as the innovations of our lifetime become commonplace.

Mardones’ web project is labyrinthine — a central frame with no clear instructions leads its user to various short action sequences, still images, and lists of text with no obvious logic. However, the project is clearly not randomly configured, and is instead defiantly impenetrable — re-mystifying a medium that is so often presented to us with a facade of the orderly and knowable layered over it. Engl’s project, an interactive video and text journal of the artist’s travels in outer space, analogizes the internet, and its potential for artists, to the extra-terrestrial frontier, a tactic which, similar to Mardones’ work, playfully mythologizes the space of the internet, and, in Engl’s case, claims its ground as fertile for artistic endeavor.

Image courtesy of Kelley Schei