Arthur C. Clarke and Intergalactic Pop Art

Arthur C Clarke, the pioneering science fiction author died on March 18, 2008 at his home in Sri Lanka. Clarke wrote more than 100 books during his career spanning seventy years. Many people worldwide know him for his unforgettable and stunning masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey’, filmed by Stanley Kubrick.
Clarke's diagnosis of an age marked by the rapid advances in technology that emnacipated the imagination of a whole generation fascinated many.
'2001: A Space Odyssey' is a pseudo history of the evolution of humankind drawing from Engels and concluding in Clarke's foresight. It starts with a depiction of the daily lives of apes, in far past times. An ape, among the many, at some point starts using its hand, operating with it. The movie does not show us a detailed process of making tools. Quite the contrary, it takes us to the very first moment when the ape was stricken by the thought to move its hand up and handle a bone. The moment is backgrounded with a score of Richard Strauss' magisterial piece 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'. In all its implications, there is a leap to a new phase in human evolution/history. We hear Nietzsche, we watch Engels (see Engels' article 'The Part Played by Labour in the Evolution of Man). Clarke thought this new phase was coming to an end in his lifetime. The hopes for a moon landing triggered the imagination of a whole generation. These rapid advances in technology, so Clarke thought, meant a leap to a new phase: the Starchild. Starting with an ape tribe, the movie links to some thousands years far with a dissolve effect that links the bone and the space ship (in the shape of a bone, as well). The movie ends with another Strauss score (this time Johann Strauss, the son - "the next generation") 'The Blue Danube', showing an embryo in the space - "the starchild", the new phase.


Intergalactic voyages and moon landing
The context that triggered the imagination of Arthur C. Clarke, which later on triggered others’ imagination, is worth mentioning for a better understanding. The excitement about the 'Space Race' between the USSR and the USA was at its height in the 60s. People were excited about the advances in technology, new life style imposed by modernity, consuming boom, and increased popularity of images.
‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ appeared in 1968 in novel and film form. The talks of a possible trip to the moon, which was realised in 1969, changed the perception of the world for many, especially the Americans. It is not hard to find a pile of fiction, films, paintings, songs, and more produced in this era, which is marked by the fascination of the possibility to conquer the space. Celebrated Pop Artist Richard Hamilton placed the moon as the ceiling of the interior of a household in his famous collage called "Just What is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing?” This was in 1956. In 1962, Hamilton paints “Towards a Definitive Statement on the Coming Trends in Men's Wear and Accessories (a) Together Let Us Explore the Stars” – a young fellow in astronaut garments - combined elements from advertising and media. The idea for the painting came from an article on male fashion in Playboy magazine. In 1968 Joe Tilson reproduces a TV capture image of Yuri Gagarin – a work of art he entitled “Transparency I: Yuri Gagarin 12 April 1961”. ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ came the same year, nominated for four Oscars, winning only one for visual effects. The film/book gave an account of the moment that triggered the history of civilisation in the sense we understand it today: the moment when an ape starts using his hand – an important step in the history of human kind as Engels noted in a famous article. Convinced by the Engels argument, the audience are left convinced by the future foreseen in the movie: a baby in space – the history of humankind is to be written somewhere in space.
When Neil Armstrong travelled to the moon in 1969, he immediately became the most popular person all over the world. His picture was everywhere, reproduced on magazines, newspapers, and so on. Everyone was almost convinced that this was a huge step taken towards the sort of life depicted by Clarke and Kubrick in the film/novel. David Bowie sang Space Oddity the next year, in 1969, to coincide with the moon-landing. In the UK, it was used in conjunction with the BBC's coverage of the landing. The song was about the alienation feeling man encountered in his voyage in the space, staring the Earth from a long distance.

Clarke was right
The astronomer Patrick Moore, a friend of Clarke's since the 1930s "He foresaw communications satellites, a nationwide network of computers, interplanetary travel; he said there would be a man on the moon by 1970 - and he was right." In 1983, Clarke wrote: "At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years." Was he right? I think he was. He sounds even far too optimistic with the concluding phrase "few hundred years". The rapid advances in technology, and the growing cyberspace (money database, identity database, image database, and so much and so on) seems like swallowing the whole world that surrounds us and at the same time gives existence to us. Imagine the representations of your identity in the cyberspace: you have this amount of money in this bank, which means you get this credit card and you can do this, this, and that - you can buy more oil, drive more, travel more; you can buy the latest fashion and with this you can wear a new trendy identity; you can get a visa for the US, or Australia, or France, or whatever. If you do not have this amount of money, you can't get a credit card, you can't go abroad, you can't get a mobile phone, and etc. The cyberspace draws the borders of identities, we become embryos in the cyber-Space.