The Massachusetts Medievalist Goes Back to the Future

New York City Edition

The Massachusetts Medievalist ventured to New York City earlier this month and while wandering around the Museum of Modern Art (great Picasso show, by the way) stumbled into the “Emerging Ecologies” exhibit. It’s a romp through 1960s and 1970s architecture and design related in some way to environmentalism, often in tandem with early awareness of the dangers of climate change. The whole thing had a fun, Jetsons-like feel to it; I was also struck by the vision the exhibit didn’t have - the way the “future,” as designed by these men 50+ years ago, was in many ways just white patriarchy, but in outer space.

Roy Scarfo, Hollow Asteroid (photograph: Mass Medievalist)

Two images by “space artist” Roy Scarfo exemplify this trend: Subsurface Lunar Colony and Hollow Asteroid, interior view, both from 1965. These gouache paintings show off-earth life in the future, where science has recreated the necessities of life (breathable air, vegetation, food production, living spaces). Hollow Asteroid even has a fish pond!

Roy Scarfo, Subsurface Lunar Colony (photograph: Mass Medievalist)

So Scarfo (and the creators of The Jetsons, for that matter), have the imagination to suggest ways that humans could live in outer space by harnessing scientific and engineering prowess - but they can’t imagine an off-world that includes active women in charge or any people of color. Both of these images use a boy as the child-default - if the white couple has only one child, it will be a boy. The boy is wearing 1960s-style playclothes, but the adults are wearing quasi-futuristic outfits that would fit in well with a James Bond movie of the same vintage. Note that the women are crisply defined as both mother and wife and they are wearing skirts. In Hollow Asteroid, the man gestures, seemingly mansplaining his creation to the little woman in her cheerleader skirt and go-go boots; in Subsurface Lunar Colony, they gaze over the colony from their balcony, her diaphanous, open-back dress clearly fit for admiring but not contributing to the work in progress.

This past Thursday, I heard Dr. Joy Buolamwini speak at the fabulous Massachusetts Conference for Women. Her keynote warned about all the ways that our culture’s biases are reproduced in supposedly objective Artificial Intelligence coding.  It’s easy to laugh at and dismiss the quaint sexism and racism of Scarfo’s mid-century outer space visions as merely products of their time. The work of Dr. Joy and her colleagues at the Algorithmic Justice League remind us that those insidious biases are still very much with us, in our present and – if we’re not proactive and aware – in our futures as well.