NOSTALGIC FUTURE
X: The Man with X-ray Eyes
The Cult film icon Roger Corman churned out a surprisingly thought-provoking sci-fi movie with X: The Man with X-ray Eyes. When a doctor develops a method for improving eyesight, he stumbles upon a great power. While he starts using his X-ray vision for colorless and mattes, he eventually finds himself looking deeper and deeper, eventually peering into the darkness of the human soul.
Electricity may be the driver
One day your car may speed along an electric super-highway, its speed and steering automatically controlled by electronic devices embedded on the road. Thanks to electricity, travel will be more enjoyable, highways safer. No traffic jams,no collisions, no driver fatigue...
Physical appearance
Physiognomy, the questionable practice of evaluating a person's character based on their physical appearance, goes back to ancient Greece. Its heyday, however, was in the 1800s, when it influenced the cranium-mapping of phrenology and criminology, with people like Italian physician Cesare Lombroso theorizing that criminals could be identified by facial features. One of the strangest investigations in the history of physiognomy was carried out in the 17th-century by the French painter Charles Le Brun, the favorite artist of Louis XIV. The images reinforced the often dangerous notion that some people resemble more an animal than a human being. They were used, as well as the physiognomic descriptions that populated art and literature, to support ominous racial and gender stereotyping.
The Crystal Ball
Known as an "orbuculum," the crystal ball has been commonly thought as a fortune telling object. The art or process of "seeing" known as "scrying," whereby images are claimed to be seen in crystals, or other media such as water, and are interpreted as meaningful information which is used to make important decisions in one's life (i.e. love, marriage, finances, travel, business, etc.). Crystal gazing was a popular pastime in the Victorian era. Exchanges between spiritism, magic and cinema were a continuous flow of concepts and ideas at a time when popular and scientific imagination was as fascinated by modern technology as by the ‘archaic’ world of occultism.
