What are World Expos For?
Two weeks ago, in the Interactive Media Seminar, Scott presented some home movies from his visit to the last Expo in Aichi. I've been meaning to comment on the presentation for a while now.
In the publicirty that he showed us for the Aichi Expo, it was billed as "the first World Expo in the 21st C". To me this begs the question, "why drag this 19th V convention into a new millenium"? Haven't World Fairs outlived their usefulness?
Early World Fairs were essentially forums for 19th colonial powers to show off the wealth of nations (which, some say, agrivated rivalries, leading to the wars). They also had a strong interventionist component, where they reimagining urban spaces. The spectacular visions presented at World Expositions such as the White City at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, inspired intense reactions ranging from The Wizard of Oz's Frank L Baum who modeled Oz on the White City, to the father of modern architecture Lous Sullivan who was appauled by its faux-baroque decadence. In the context of contemporary urban sociology (the "LA school"), it is also interesting to note that World's Fair historians the White City was in some regards the prototypical "simcity" or "careceral archipleago", carefully managed to keep ethnicities out as much as to keep the spectracle in.
In the 20th C World Fairs further developed these themes, but also functioned as temples to new consumer technologies. While the 19th C World Fairs tended to hide the march of industrialism under the guise of the neogothic, the great 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows NY helped established the Buck Rogers "look of the future", particualrly through GM's Futurama exhibit, which featured the famed Trylon and Perisphere (pictured above). The '39 World Fair was considered a high point for the era, as the was the '67 Expo in Montreal (which also featured a sphere though this time a Buckysphere).
'39 signalled a new phase in World Fairs in which corporations used them to prepare the ground for acceptance of their visions of the future. According to STS theorist Richard Rogers, GM's vision of a automotive utopia in Futurama set the tone for what he called the "zero friction society"
Richard Rogers argues that aver the past 50 years the ideological function of World Fairs to train the public in the use of technologies has however arguably been rendered irrelevant by the growth of the consumer society. We no longer need to go to a temple of progress to be trained to accept corporate visions of the future, a theory developed in Alfred Heller's "World's Fairs and the End of Progress". So what then was the point of Expo 2005 in Aichi? Perhaps today, World Fairs have become venues for interactive installtion artists interested in producing works with grand narrative themes.