This presents some interesting thought experiments around digital preservation and emulation. Will there be "software archeologists" in the future, pouring over ancient programming languages and attempting to execute or emulate these environments? It's kind of amusing to imagine a museum centuries in the future, trying to understand how to execute JVM bytecode, let alone how computers of the day worked. The Rosetta Stone of 2500? Hello World.
This is a funny thought. In 5000 years, at least some crazy person will think the people of 2022 were wise/profound/intelligent/whatever. They'll look at the code minting NFTs etc, think deep thoughts, write wise sounding blog posts about the wise people of 2022. He/she won't realize we are... a bunch of... not very wise people...
What will be known in 500yr will only be stuff of very major importance will be art that seeks to document or memorialize the most important events of our time.
What art do we have that's still widely known from the 1500s?
Well, outside of Mona Lisa and the works of Shakespeare the general Western public is probably only going to recognize depictions of the key players and events of the time. The official portrait of Henry VIII, depictions of Luther, the Spanish armada, the Spanish conquest of the new world, stuff like that.
With respect to purely creative works, e.g. Shakespeare, that was just high quality pop culture art of the time. They didn't know it would stand the test of time. Only looking back generations later was the influential art of the renaissance identifiable.
Even when it comes to current events most stuff that is of major "will be known in centuries" importance we don't yet know is of major importance and will not be identifiable as such until later.
I'm convinced the vast majority of humanity's cultural output over the last 100 years will be permanently lost to time within the next hundred, due to most of it being stored in ephemeral digital form. The likelihood of the partial or total collapse of technological civilization, infrastructure and knowledge transfer following the pending collapse of our biosphere is simply too great, and that chain of infrastructure and education is necessary to keep copying and updating all of that digital information from generation to generation, and maintaining a cultural awareness of the necessary software and media used. Unlike the Rosetta stone, you can't just look at an SSD drive and glean language from it.
What will remain is plastic - toys and garbage. Maybe future archaeologists will think our anime figurines were ceremonial fetish objects.
The biggest shared cultural experience of the 16th century was the church, and it is omnipresent in the art we have remaining from then. Nowadays the biggest cultural touchstones are commercial.
Great question. These are things I personally enjoy, but of the things I like, they generally have a) timeless or cross-culturally relevant messages that are b) relatively accessible.
I mean, the OP has posed an impossible question, and I'm prepared to be wrong. But unlike other commentators I don't think that Pokemon will have the same type of timeless appeal as, say, Shakespeare. The trick / hard thing to do is to separate current popularity from "sticking power." For a good illustration of how currently popular things can fade from memory, its worth checking out old best-seller lists (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...)
Does photojournalism count as art? I'd say it's a relatively safe bet that some photos of the Twin Towers on 9/11 will still be very recognisable in several centuries.
If I had to put money on a longbet that in all likelihood I won't live to see the outcome of, it would be anything Marvel or Disney ( with fragments of the Star Wars franchise being most likely ). Has enough global appeal and likely to have the necessary persistence.
Edit: Any religious text with sufficient population: Qu'ran, Bible, Torah, etc.
Edit 2: I realized only in the last 20 years. In that case, I stand by my original statement.
I would argue the exact opposite and say that pretty much all of the Marvel and Disney stuff is largely lacking in artistic value and will be forgotten. I feel like people in 500 years would not be very interested in seeing 500 different variations of good guy beating bad guy.
Perhaps, but that reminds me, I forgot to mention the Bible. Facepalm. Of course the religious texts will still exist, and provide evidence for why I disagree with you. The surviving "books of the Bible" per KJV were simply the most popular by the Church of the time, perhaps because they (I'm no theologian ) served the interests of the Church/elites better at the time. In any case, I'm betting more on "breadth", than "depth".
I'd say most storytelling throughout history has been good guy vs bad guy. I bet there were similar stories in 1400 AD. Knight-errant was a major literary genre during that era, probably similar to the superhero genre today.
Aristotle talks about three genres in Poetics: comedy, drama, and epic. He considered the epic as having the same elements as drama, but it's more reliant on song and spectacle. From the examples given, it sounds like Homer was the Stan Lee of the era.
The Marvel movie source material will be remembered (The original comic books from the 1960s). But in 500 years the movies will have repeated themselves so often I don't know if anyone will care about today's comic book adaptations. Nobody really cares about the 1910 Wizard of Oz film, for example, even if they love the 1939 later Wizard of Oz film.
To use your analogy in the other direction: nobody talks about the Wizard of Oz source material. Were you aware the movies were based on a book? Maybe Marvel comics will go the same way.
I'd say, almost none of it, and just as likely to be something that isnt recognized as art today.
Even the greats came within a whisker of obscurity, eg Bach was all but forgotten for a hundred years until Mendelssohn fought for his music to be unearthed and performed.
And to my second point, museums are full of ephemera that was disregarded in its lifetime but now tells us what we think is a lot about the time then. Roman trash and Victorian hairbrushes. What survives might not and hqve never been labelled "art"
And then you have the massive problem of digital rot. i can barely read my CDs from 20 years ago. Now we don't own our digital assets so much as pay for them to stay alive in an S3 bucket. When we pass, and stop paying, they will disappear. Like tears in the rain.
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadIn 5000yr archeologists will read Elon's tweets and conclude that politicians have always sucked.
What art do we have that's still widely known from the 1500s?
Well, outside of Mona Lisa and the works of Shakespeare the general Western public is probably only going to recognize depictions of the key players and events of the time. The official portrait of Henry VIII, depictions of Luther, the Spanish armada, the Spanish conquest of the new world, stuff like that.
With respect to purely creative works, e.g. Shakespeare, that was just high quality pop culture art of the time. They didn't know it would stand the test of time. Only looking back generations later was the influential art of the renaissance identifiable.
Even when it comes to current events most stuff that is of major "will be known in centuries" importance we don't yet know is of major importance and will not be identifiable as such until later.
What will remain is plastic - toys and garbage. Maybe future archaeologists will think our anime figurines were ceremonial fetish objects.
Oxford university?
- The Ministry for The Future, Kim Stanley Robinson (might be seen as an important historical marker of the spread of knowledge about climate change.)
- On the Nature of Daylight, by Max Richter?
- Coco (Pixar Film.)
- The Intouchables (Film)
- Possibly some of Brother Ali's recent discography? (Not sure if will be well known, but I predict a long shelf-life.)
I mean, the OP has posed an impossible question, and I'm prepared to be wrong. But unlike other commentators I don't think that Pokemon will have the same type of timeless appeal as, say, Shakespeare. The trick / hard thing to do is to separate current popularity from "sticking power." For a good illustration of how currently popular things can fade from memory, its worth checking out old best-seller lists (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...)
Edit: Any religious text with sufficient population: Qu'ran, Bible, Torah, etc.
Edit 2: I realized only in the last 20 years. In that case, I stand by my original statement.
Aristotle talks about three genres in Poetics: comedy, drama, and epic. He considered the epic as having the same elements as drama, but it's more reliant on song and spectacle. From the examples given, it sounds like Homer was the Stan Lee of the era.
Architecture? Might depend on what's still standing in 500 years.
Even the greats came within a whisker of obscurity, eg Bach was all but forgotten for a hundred years until Mendelssohn fought for his music to be unearthed and performed.
And to my second point, museums are full of ephemera that was disregarded in its lifetime but now tells us what we think is a lot about the time then. Roman trash and Victorian hairbrushes. What survives might not and hqve never been labelled "art"
And then you have the massive problem of digital rot. i can barely read my CDs from 20 years ago. Now we don't own our digital assets so much as pay for them to stay alive in an S3 bucket. When we pass, and stop paying, they will disappear. Like tears in the rain.