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THE MUSEUM OF EXTINCT TOMORROWS
An archaeological atlas of a future that never existed.
I built a custom Recraft V4 Style from public-domain nineteenth-century scientific diagrams by John Emslie, then used it to document eight wholly fictional artifacts: The Silent Carrier, The Chronicle Engine, The Memory Loom, The Climate Ribbon, The Dream Recorder, The Sequence Extractor, The Sleep Vessel, and The Oracle of Plastic.
Each plate treats speculative technology as excavated evidence: one principal specimen, a cutaway, and diagnostic fragments, rendered through engraved linework and restrained hand colour. The project avoids brands, real people, recognisable products, and readable generated text.
The network for creativity
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What if the future had been imagined a century ago?
I’m exploring the fascinating intersection of vintage science-fiction art and futuristic technology for the Recraft × Contra Design Challenge.
Inspired by antique illustrations, forgotten inventions, and surreal planetary landscapes, I’m developing “THE UNDISCOVERED FUTURE” — a fictional archive where yesterday’s artistic imagination meets tomorrow’s possibilities.
The goal is to transform a historical visual language into something unexpected, cohesive, and entirely new.
Sometimes, the most interesting vision of the future comes from looking into the past.
#Contra #Recraft #DesignChallenge #VintageIllustration #AIArt
I found Eugène Grasset’s 1896 La plante et ses applications ornementales, a pattern book of Art Nouveau plant studies, on the Public Domain Image Archive, sourced from the Smithsonian Libraries via the Internet Archive. I used four of its plates as references to build a custom Recraft V4 Style called “Flora Urbana – Grasset Ornament”. The series, Flora Urbana: A Botanical Atlas of Modern Life, treats everyday technology as newly discovered species, each plate with a specimen above and abstracted ornament borders below. Earbuds become flower buds, a drone becomes a winged seed, a video call becomes a bed of blossoms, and an electric kettle becomes a snail. Grasset’s flat, lithographed look makes the modern objects feel like they belong in a Victorian herbarium.
Trades of the 21st Century: a lost Company School album of modern work.
In the Wellcome Collection I found a run of anonymous 1800s watercolours of Delhi trades. A carpenter, a jeweller, a rice seller: each squats on bare cream paper with the tools of the trade laid out around him. These "Company School" albums were painted to catalogue a city's working life, so I trained a Recraft V4 Style on nine of them and asked it to paint the trades their painter could never have imagined. The result is ten new plates: the delivery rider checking his phone beside an e-scooter, the phone repairer with his loupe, the creator in front of her ring light, the earbud seller weighing earbuds on a brass scale. Same pose, same patience, new tools.
