visionaries: Albert Robida
It’s been a while since we last put another visionary figure from the past in the spotlight. For that matter, let’s pay a visit to France, a country which has brought forth quite a few. Among them there is the fascinating Albert Robida (1848-1926) (or for those of you who understand French, see also here).
Albert Robida – visionary, illustrator, caricaturist, novellist – had a visual mind, which allowed him to ‘distort’ reality and explore what such new forms of the world might mean. Both his drawings as well as his stories show a scenarist at heart, stage-setting an integrated view of a world yet to exist. He was a visionary who not only looked at technologies, but also at their consequences, social changes brought about in society, etc. In a unique way, his work showed a future ‘in context’.
In retrospect many of Robida’s boundless ‘fantasies’ at the time have turned into reality in one way or another, in some contexts, to certain degrees. His visionary mind’s eye saw the female’s struggle for gender equality, modern warfare with robotic missiles and poisoned gas, the ‘air-bus’ (cf. airliners), the phono-opéragraphe (cf. walkman), the ‘telephonoscope’ (cf. tv), ‘téléconférences’ (made me smile and think of our friend Otlet), mass produced food, the abolition of the death penalty, pollution and the need to conserve nature, mass-tourism, etc.
For those of you hungry for more, several of his written works are freely available online (e.g. The end of books, visit the French National Library’s online digital archives Gallica for several more of his works)
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