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Abstract

This article explores the ramified meaning of the idea of ‘Tomorrow’ in the mid 1950s. It looks at a number of fictional and non fictional attempts to predict futures on the basis of extrapolating from the technological and cultural phenomena of the then present. With particular reference to the 1956 Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition, the author seeks to establish the parameters of conjecture as well as the timely cultural politics of the Independent Group. He suggests how writers and thinkers, such as Charles and Ray Eames and Norbert Wiener, combined with the filtering of information theory in contemporary science fiction to generate significant harbingers of digital culture in the formulations of the ‘Tomorrow’ of 1956.

Keywords

apocalyptic assemblage Cold War collage communications future futurology post-industrial utopian

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