Looking Forward by Kenneth Jr. (snow like ashes .txt) 📗

of man—proud to be a part of humankind that has solved the problem of how to live an abundant life without invading the “living room” of other people. Slavery and the wage system of the past are no longer necessary to get human beings to spend their lives in toil. Hella wonders if further developments beyond the man-machine complex are possible.

12. The Cultural Center

On the evening before her trip to the industrial complex, Hella visits a nearby Cultural Center. Each city in the new age has its own Cultural Center that reflects the moods, interests, and feelings of the people of that city. Cultural diversity is neither encouraged nor discouraged. To a certain extent it just happens. Perhaps because of the divergent cultures of previous centuries, each city in the world of the twenty-first century seems to have its own flavor.

In the twentieth century escapist entertainment such as sadistic movies, the boob tube, bars and night clubs were a part of a pattern of the joyless pursuit of pleasure. In contrast, the Cultural Centers in the new society offer companionship and engaging and challenging displays that make them popular. Cultural Centers are somewhat different from previous exhibition and art centers; they are open twenty-four hours a day and many of their displays are constantly changing. Because of the large creative output of most men and women in the new world, and because of the ease of recording this output, it is possible to program automatically thousands of displays which are sometimes changed as often as once every hour.

There is no panel of art critics to judge which paintings and sculptures appear and which do not. Whenever someone is satisfied with one of his artistic creations, he sends it to Corcen, and it is scheduled to appear in various places. In selected areas a recorder measures the reactions of the viewers. If a work of art receives only a quick glance, the recorder notes this. Art that receives the most attention is automatically scheduled to appear throughout larger and larger areas of the world. The several hundred thousand works of art that receive the greatest attention each year throughout the world are chosen for the continuously changing exhibitions in the Cultural Centers. In this way everyone in the new world expresses his feelings about the world around him. These feelings are shared by others through automatic mechanisms that do not involve biased art critics, picture hangers, or dust-catching museums with the same pictures staring at people for decade after decade. Cybernated mechanisms are also used for indexing, classifying, and distributing the articles, scientific papers, plays, books, poems, music, and other creations of the people of the new society.

The Cultural Center is dynamic. One can go many days in succession and find enough change to remain interested. Someone remarked that you can seldom see the same thing twice. The reply was given that you can seldom see the same thing once. If one particularly enjoys a display, he can record a number and have it reproduced in his apartment any time that he wishes.

The settings of the various displays are engineered to be exciting. Many interior partitions and platforms are constantly moving. The entire Cultural Center pulses with an infinite variety of colors and sounds that emanate from the living geometry of the functional interior.

The more permanent exhibits with technical and scientific displays give comprehensive presentations of the submicroscopic, microscopic, and macroscopic structures of the natural world. Some of the exhibits are solid; others are teleprojections that only appear to occupy three-dimensional space. One can often walk through walls that look solid. Some of the “imagineered” forms represent aspects of Einstein’s space-time formulations. Most are dynamic and continue to change as one watches them. Art and science, complementing each other, are interwoven in a demonstration of the genius of man.

As Hella and the other visitors to the Cultural Center relax upon the comfortable conveyor systems, they are able to see the splendor of fantastic worlds unfolding in this sensorium. Mathematics is the most precise means of correlating symbols with the non-verbal physical world, and many of the mathematical displays are particularly interesting to her. If there is anything Hella wants to know, her inquiries are readily answered by built-in automatic communication devices.

The music of the twenty-first century is enormously expanded in complexity as compared to the simple orchestral effects of the past. A large proportion of the people enjoy creating music. They produce symbols that are fed into electronic music synthesizers. Within seconds one hears his composition as though played by a large orchestra. By adjusting the deviation of the notes, the style of genius musicians such at Heifetz can be duplicated on works composed many years after his death! These machines can electrically reproduce the sound of a human voice, a single instrument, an orchestra of 1,000 musicians, or any sound or noise from any source. No musical instruments or musicians are needed although some enjoy using these quaint instruments. These music synthesizers were pioneered by RCA in the mid-twentieth century.

The cybernated musical engineering of the new world produces infinite variations in the pitch, timbre, growth, duration, and decay of the tone, intensity, portamento, or, sliding trombone effect, and vibrato and tremolo. This multi-dimensional music is 1,000 times more flexible and varied than the orchestrations of the past. The music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms was limited in comparison.

Labor Day

One of the dynamic displays reminds Hella that it is Labor Day, the twenty-seventh anniversary of the abolition of the last paid work performed on the planet. With the termination of the last job, money became obsolete. A huge telescreen shows bonfires of paper currency that were ignited throughout the world, symbolizing man’s final emancipation from the slavery of wages. Dollars, pounds, rubles, pesos, francs, yen—through immolation they served mankind for the last time.

Two hundred fifty billion dollars in paper money was burned in a ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. The speaker on this rededication of Labor Day pointed out