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There is a prehistory of anticipations of the Future, fundamentally at the heart of Christianity where most court and indeed cathedral art addressed the way it was all going to look. Anticipations of Heaven were usually tepid and ritualistic with a proliferation of clouds and whiskers. It is helpful to subdivide future imaging/ divination into
1. Technology 2. The Spiritual 3. Time Time, I tried to put together a taxonomy of what it entails http://www.fulltable.com/vts/t/time/menu.htm hoping a visual tendency might emerge, but lost interest before I went mad.
Technology is an interesting challenge because one branch may be a logical projection from existing technology; another might be a technology that doesn’t exist yet. Hence Leonardo’s notebooks project from existing war machines, flying machines etc
Fortune technical illustration http://www.fulltable.com/vts/f/fortune/menub.htm
Visual primer of Advertising Cliches http://advertisingcliche.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/future%20technology
http://advertisingcliche.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Future
Cartoons
http://cartoonclicheprimer.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/future%20predictions
It’s an interesting question, when did an artist/ group of artists specifically attempt to anticipate the way the Future was going to look. Attempts before 1900 were usually whimsical with a foot clearly in the present. Sometimes they had satirical content e/g/ gender politics, attitudes to the working classes.
Spiritual/Spatial see L.D.Henderson The Fourth Dimensional in Art – the book has an early section on the pioneering years of Science Fiction (Wells,Lovecraft ).
In spatial terms that claimed aspects of the spiritual the decade of the 1880’s saw imagery generated for the Theosophists that was abstracted and capable of being used as the basis of speculation about further dimensions (n’th dimensional geometry)
http://www.fulltable.com/vts/c/colour/menun.htm
Influential on Mondriaan, Kandinsky, Kupka, and, as he once let slip, Duncan Grant. That the future might be disembodied and be pure energy or colour.
That may be the future was unfolding simultaneously with the present.T S Eliot Time present and past etc http://www.davidgorman.com/4Quartets/1-norton.htm ,Four Quartets, Burnt Norton
W.B.Yeats saw Time as a Gyre where you are located on a spiral looking across to a higher strand of the future. Hence a philosophical take on the Future.
Influential was Henri Bergson, Simultaneity, Duree, where time was not fixed but fluid and everything was in a state of flux.
Early reports of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity projected Time unfolding in two different ways depending whether you were on the earth’s surface or travelling in a space ship. Also the interest in Time Travelling. Early editions of Wells have some illustrations.
Perhaps most influential writer was Jules Verne prolific and popular. Most of his books have fancy decorations on the front boards.
In the early years of the 20th century there was interest in transcending the experienced Time/Space continuum and breaking through to another dimension , through a tear in reality. Duchamp’s large glass said if an object in 3D casts a 2 D shadow, perhaps the fourth dimensional object casts a three dimensional shadow, and so on and so on beyond 11 dimensions (see E A Abbott FLATLAND).
Artists worth looking at
Claude Bragdon, http://www.fulltable.com/vts/aoi/b/bragdon/a.htm
Malevich and his opera Victory over the sun 1913 (the Black Square)
Futurists in rhetoric and image claiming the Future for their own, Sant”Elia devising the architectural forms of the Future.
Film , All of this later influenced by Lang’s Metropolis and The Shape of Things to Come.
Not really planned but hope this adds a few names I’ll think more and get back to your Chris I’m free this coming Saturday morning if that’s any good
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