The CGSociety interviews Syd Mead at
the ADAPT conference in Montreal,
where he shares his extraordinary visions.
ome are blessed with talent, some with connections, some
with intelligence and foresight, and others with luck and
fortune. Some have it all, and that is the story of ADAPT speaker and conceptual designer Syd Mead, who leapt to prominence in 1982 with his work on Blade Runner and TRON. Often billed as a “Visual Futurist”, Mead’s work has influenced decades of design work in film, and in life.
“Visual Futurist,” Mead explained, “is a name I invented for myself. I got a call from New York; they were doing end rolls for Blade Runner, the second movie I’d ever worked on. I’m not a member of any of the Academy categories such as production designer, art director, so forth, so I had to make something up on the fly. Visual futurist was a kind of convenient, short description of dealing with the future, which I most often do as a design request, and visual, because I can paint and draw and do all those wonderful arty things. So Visual Futurist was… sort of vaguely specific,” Mead said with a laugh.
Mead is a very approachable man, congenial and easy to talk to, but it doesn’t take long to discover the degree of perception that this scholar combines with his visions. His imagination and proficiency have brought him many opportunities beyond his list of films. One that caught my attention was Mead’s commission to design the interior of King Fah’d’s 747 in 1983. “That was an enormous challenge. I had to fit a very complex geometry and furnishings into a 747 hull, and the first thing you have to think about is everything has to come through that door because the plane is [already] made. I designed some of these spaces with a geometric precision, linked all the spaces together by vector points. The [engineers] tried to change them and they couldn’t, everything came apart.”
He is currently designing an environment of sorts, and though he could not explain the details, he was able to reveal he’s working on a commercial environment in an urban area, with the idea to recreate a kind of visual field softening of the rectilinear space. His intended method will be to create disruptive angles of floor patterns and ceiling and large shroud panels with projected lighting that duplicates the soft shifting of sunlight through the crown of a forest. “We are going to ionize the air, and have puff air-conditioning. Your brain will think it’s in a much nicer environment than it possibly is. It’s a food thing. I can’t talk about it, but it’s one of the more challenging tasks of my career.”
Mead has drawn inspiration from many artists, including EXPOSÉ 5 Grand Master John Berkey, who “has this fascinating talent for depicting reality in an imaginative format. His space ships, his scenes of the future have these explosive colorations. You can’t build a model of that, but it has a visceral, chromatic inertia to it. Fascinating artist.” Mead, a designer who is also capable of painting and illustrating “very accurately up to my own needs for satisfaction or what the client is going to pay for,” finds balance with the two fields combined. “Painters are usually not designers, so they can paint very nicely, but they don’t design yachts or airplanes or cars, or artifacts, because that’s not what they are trained to do. And, in their own minds, I am sure there is no point in doing it, let someone else do it. And that’s me,” he chuckled.
When we met with Mead at ADAPT, his lecture touched on that and more. He shared his views on how one attributes to the broad span of design, whether it’s for games, movies, or super yachts, because the methodology of thinking, and the procedure is essentially identical. He sees a contribution in offering aesthetics as problem solving designs. “You are creating to a specific demand that’s being commercial. I’d never want to be a gallery artist because I’m not interested in hanging fiberglass soap cravats on step-ladders. The procedure for satisfying the demand for specific commercial purposes, the procedure and the methodology stays the same.”
Mead gives a rare depth of consideration in his work, elevating an attractive design with function to an art form with a purpose, and his passion for finding what might be beyond imagination is tempered with one who takes responsibility for the ideas he implants. “The danger we have now, and I see it as a danger, is the proscenium, the line, between reality and illusion. Artificially created illusion is becoming more and more blurred, and there'll be a time in the very near future where you simply won't be able to tell the difference. And we don't know psychologically, or culturally, how to approach that yet.
When you start to be able to embed chips or do EKG broadcasts that directly address the processing centers of the brain, you have crossed that immersive in-out proscenium between [reality and illusion]. Brain chemistry is extremely complex, and science is now perfecting the method of picking up an EKG signal and people being able to move prosthetic arms and things like that, so that’s already happening.”
The implications were disturbing, and I asked him what he saw as the best and worst case scenarios. “Well, we'll have to invent an alpha-curve or beta-curve or something that you can pick up to find out at what level the person exists. Remember, your brain is in the dark. Your eyes are direct nerve stretch links to the brain itself, and whatever you see around you is audited by what you think you can see, so reality is transient. They've proven this over and over again. If you start tampering with that deliberately, I don't know what's going to happen. I don’t think anybody does. The people with AI, and the psychological experimenting with technological extensions, I think they are desperately trying to figure it out because it could either be a tool, a science fiction staple, absolute domination of a population- or freeing up the spirit to create new horizons in creative thinking and imaginative problem solutions.”
Citing asymptotic statistical analysis with graphed phenomenon, when all the graph lines go vertical together, he spoke of when predictions turned to mere guesses limited only by imagination. Technological progress, transportation, the speed of travel- all these fields, according to current statistical graphing, go asymptotic for a ten year spread that currently falls between 2020 and 2030. Therefore, a concept of the future beyond these years could be anything you want, but there is still a need to overlay it with an interactive human drama, personality conflict, or something familiar in which to root the story.
“I see the future as a contest between human intelligence being degraded by dogma, and human intelligence being allowed to invent itself to solutions and to its own credit.” When asked how he would illustrate that, his design leaned towards utopian, modified by enough reality to locate it in its own context, but suggesting it could be better than that. Of course, his designs often lean towards something grittier with odd discontinuities, as demonstrated by his work in Aliens and the recently re-released Blade Runner, where the microclimate was horrible, capturing the cities own heat and humidity under the dismal and relentless rain. Yet Rachael, played by Sean Young, comes into the scene in a fur coat, and Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, runs around in a full-length overcoat.
That disparity triggered an odd mismatch between what really might be logical, but is not. “That’s a hook, and Ridley knew that. That’s one of the reasons it was so successful, because the movie is completely immersive. So my view of the future is optimistic but tempered with the fact, and knowing realistically that if we don’t help ourselves towards this satisfying idealistic utopian goal, it’s all going to go to hell.”
Mead knows all about the consequences of Hell. Growing up a Baptist Minister Fundamentalist’s son, Mead had a thorough education of biblical mythology mixed in to his creative genius. His philosophy related to the tree of knowledge of good and evil as a way of saying humanity achieved a level of intelligence by becoming self aware, and we are able to make decisions outside the boundaries of our own “firmware”. Humans, therefore, are responsible for knowing right from wrong only because of that self-awareness and millions of years of development.
“To violate that is like saying being human isn’t any more important than being a rock. When you insult that intelligence by dogma, or formalized thinking that’s enforced, you’re offending that intelligence capacity.” But he has hope that we will enter into a new intelligence when we have computer processors that can think faster without the overload of emotional shading, inventing the extraordinary by crosslinking between vast databases, inventing things we might normally never have thought of under the limits a mere lifetime of information can provide.
Is this where Syd Mead thinks humanity is headed? He couldn’t say, but he pointed to a surprising example, the “unfortunate” urban phenomenon of graffiti, corduroy suits, and the English author Thorsten Veblen, who celebrated the percolation of common taste, up to the elite level, boosted versions of lower class practice, articles, clothing, the whole cultural phenomenon. “Periodically you’ll see a retro drift back to a formal style set and then you layer over the top of that. I think that will always happen. Marie Antoinette was a perfect example; she pretended to be a milkmaid three days out of the week, she had her little castle over here, and her helpers, her ladies in waiting, and of course she just played the game a little too well and eventually had her head removed. The whole idea of cultural progression is always at the consent of the popular element that actually has control, and the lower classes have control simply because there is more of them. That has been common throughout history.”
Syd Mead is anything but taking it easy these days. His grueling speaking schedule is matched by the work that he still is asked to do on productions for all manner of media. He is a member of the CGSociety Advisory Board and has judged many Ballistic Publishing books as well. Syd is also a judge in the NVIDIA/CGSociety NVArt Art Space – Architecture and Landscape competition, which is in progress right now on CGSociety.
ome are blessed with talent, some with connections, some
with intelligence and foresight, and others with luck and
fortune. Some have it all, and that is the story of ADAPT speaker and conceptual designer Syd Mead, who leapt to prominence in 1982 with his work on Blade Runner and TRON. Often billed as a “Visual Futurist”, Mead’s work has influenced decades of design work in film, and in life. 
