Temporal imagination of future art

　　With the advent of Sora Wensheng Video and Udio's AI music generator, AI technology has provided artists and creators with more creative tools and sources of inspiration, and humans are becoming a new trend of dancing with AI. All of this has led us to realize that the rapid development of AI technology is asking us the following questions: What kind of future will we face? How will we move towards our future? How do our literature and art express the future?

　　The development of AI technology is opening a new door to art for us, and the recent release of Sora's Wensheng video has brought us inspiration for artistic creation, and human-machine co-creation is becoming a new trend. This in itself is one of the consequences of the posthuman research context that emerged in the 90s of the 20th century and sparked a boom in discussion in the 21st century. Posthuman research pays close attention to the access and impact of information technology and biotechnology on human body and consciousness, understands the new trend of human society, culture and civilization development under the path of human-machine coordinated development, and derives further discussion on life philosophy and ontology on this basis. Science fiction culture continues to flourish in the process, allowing us to gaze and think about the future with fantastic imagination and bold predictions. All of this has led us to realize that the rapid development of AI technology in the world is asking us the following serious questions: What kind of future will we face? How will we move towards our future? How do our literature and art express the future?

　　The future itself is a creation of ideas

　　When we focus on the concept of "future", we find that the future itself is a kind of conceptual creation. The "arrow of time" (a concept proposed by the British astrophysicist Eddington in 1927) based on Newton's concept of absolute time shows that time, as an objective and just measure, presents the direction of development and change of things to us in an irreversible way, and further confirms and consolidates the modern scientific concept. For example, Einstein's theory of relativity smashed Newton's general notion of absolute time, that is, any event in the universe occurs at a certain point in space, at a certain moment in time, and the moment is the same everywhere. Albert Einstein discovered that the time presented was not the same for different observers of motion. Developments in quantum physics have also led us to realize that absolute time does not apply to very small scales involving atoms and subatomic particles. The challenges of the physical sciences make the movement of time complex and diverse. The analysis of the philosophy and theory of time allows us to further see that behind the stable and certain expression of time, there are more uncertainties and multifacets. As a conceptual invention, "future" is often expressed as a utopian/dystopian imagination in social and political life. The various political forces of the masses combined with the emancipatory potential of technology converged into a variety of emancipatory visions that sought to lead the masses to a new world for the better with new technologies. All kinds of art forms show people's future imagination and expectations with their forward-looking, emancipatory and heralding nature.

　　Art itself is constantly challenging the established order and trying to show possible future paths. At the beginning of the 20th century, art schools such as surrealism, cubism, and futurism emerged to project life and art into future life with a dynamic and individualistic attitude. Futurism has even become an ideological revolutionary attitude, exuding the power to shape the people of the future. In contrast to the futurist art genre's proposition of the future, surrealist and cubist art uses the expression of the Chimera, the abstract and profound mode of thought, with unprecedented boldness and enthusiasm, to express and highlight the temporal imagination of future art. Surrealist and cubist art wonderfully combined science and technology with artistic imagination. As a master of surrealism, Dalí blends softness and hardness, objectivity and subjectivity, experience and rationality in The Metamorphosis of Memory, using the softly folded record of time carrier and the hard and clear time record itself to form an expressive tension, breaking the binary mode of thinking and giving us insight into the appearance and the conscious world behind the appearance. "Space Elephant" breaks the opposition between light and heavy, fragile and strong, huge and small, and breaks through our real experience in the way of collage and reconstruction, leading us into the future world that has not yet arrived. The Cubist paintings, typified by Picasso, constructed a new model of communication between science and mathematics, technology and art in the form of rupture, analysis and reorganization. Apollinel said that Picasso's cubism showed his four-dimensional view of man and the universe. Obviously, Dalí and Picasso's artistic creations break through people's habitual ways of understanding the world, and show a bizarre future world through the fusion of art and science. These artistic creations break the boundaries of sensory perception and the traditional concepts and epistemologies constructed by them, reconstructing and reorganizing world cognition in an interdisciplinary and multi-module way, thus creating a new picture of the future.

　　Compared with the figurative representation of painting and sculpture, science fiction presents a picture of the future with more textual tension and more imaginative challenges. The Dune novel series presents the fusion of human bodily consciousness and the environment with unprecedented density and depth of language. The Beni Jessirit sisters have a rigorous body perception training method, the purpose of which is to make the body's senses and touches extremely sensitive, so as to capture the ultimate state of uncertainty and the way the body changes to nature, so as to see the law in the chaos, find the law from disorder, and grasp the relative stability, so as to build a future model. And the spice that sparks the strife is the medium that leads people to see the future. Hallucinations triggered by the toxicity of fragrances move consciousness between the body and the physical environment, thus seeing illusions and a kind of re-construction of the world. This is what the future portends. Dune 3 details the development of the consciousness of Leto, the son of Paul, and his future foresight. The illusion engulfed him. The illusion expands into the memory of the solid, separating the past and the present, the future and the present, the future and the past...... As his inner consciousness expands, so does his ego. Time was flowing, and he couldn't make it stop at a certain moment. Fragments of past and future memories overwhelmed him, like fragments of montage, their relationships constantly changing, his memories like a lens, a light, illuminating the fragments, showing them separately, but unable to stop their eternal movement and change. Therefore, the conscious future itself is to capture the microscopic evolution of the present with extremely keen perception and deduce its development from this, thus forming an understanding of the future, so as to prepare in advance.

　　Creativity originates from the human subconscious mind

　　Therefore, the future imagination of science fiction literature and surreal art has made us deeply aware of the importance of insight into human consciousness. This representation of consciousness was seen by Arthur Miller as an imaginary faculty, and the interior itself is integrated into the gestalt of conscious, subconscious, and conscious minds. Miller, when comparing the development of Einstein's scientific concept with the development of Picasso's concept of art, miraculously found that scientists and artists had a wonderful creative relationship, and they were both looking for new aesthetic forms, and they both found them, that is, "for Einstein, it is a minimalist aesthetic form that unites space and time in a single framework; For Picasso, it was to reduce all forms to geometry". And they both recognize that art and science are means of reaching beyond perception and beyond appearance. In the common trend towards abstraction and new visual imagination, the integration of disciplines and the new exploration of the world are like a mosaic of many tiles, giving birth to a high degree of creative thinking, so as to achieve the integration of science, technology and art.

　　At the same time, temporal imagination itself is also built on the spatial mode of thinking. As Miller reveals, "innovative ideas do not emerge in any real-time order, but in an explosion of ideas, consistent with the memoirs of famous writers such as Einstein, Poincaré and Picasso, and the results of a series of psychological experiments." These conclusions are so different from anything that has come before that they are the pinnacle of extreme interdisciplinary thinking, and as such, any creative mindset based on digital coding is adversely affected by a linear, overly rational basis. A typical example is computer simulation thinking, which is simulated as something that progressively solves the problems of various branches of a decision tree, which of course is placed in a space with multiple possibilities, but these possibilities cannot be endless and must be limited. The reason is simple: you have to write software, and the software you write should run on existing hardware." The path of breakthrough is the Gestalt thinking of human consciousness, which is prominently presented as subconscious thinking. He makes a detailed distinction between conscious thinking and subconscious thinking. Conscious thinking, that is, the selection of problems and subject content, requires a clear understanding of the existing situation and a recognition of the future value and significance of the problem or topic content to be studied. The subconscious mind, on the other hand, is "network thinking", in which unrelated disciplinary concepts are organically combined through mental images or appropriate metaphors, and this connection leads to inspiration, that is, the moment when creativity is born. "The flash of inspiration is not a question of what, but of how. It does not provide new facts; Rather, it is to find the appropriate image or metaphor so that one knows how to think about the facts at hand. Deeper understanding or hints come later, and then guiding principles emerge that can limit and guide new combinations of facts. These guiding principles, artistically and scientifically, are equally logically coherent to the work in front of them, and are immediately visible, aesthetically pleasing and intuitively intelligible. Such a thinking structure is a powerful driving force and component of creativity. "This guiding principle acts like a filter with the aim of generating the most productive results through aesthetics, visual imagery, theoretical coherence and intuition. Human beings are also inspired by their subconscious minds, which leads to unprecedented creativity. (Produced by the "Thought Workshop" of the social science newspaper, the full text can be found in the social science newspaper and its official website)