Spanning the Centuries




Copyright(C)1996 MATSUSHITA ELECTRIC INDUSTRIAL CO.,LTD.

Ito: They did the same thing in 1939, at the New York Expo. Such time capsules might be substitutes for common ownership, having the possibility of becoming myth. Although people create time capsules for different reasons, that of the Osaka Expo was packaged as a slice of the 1970s. Ever since the New York Expo, the World Exposition itself began to have this character of packaging time. I think this is closely related to our eagerness today to file all information into databases, and also to our conception of museums. It is a manifestation of the 20th century's attitude towards time, this desire to capture it whole. Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is a perfect example of this. Our century has been a time of speed: if we think about the speed of human communication 100 or 150 years ago, before the telegraph or telephone, it was like that of walking. And today, information travels through space at the speed of light. For people living in this age of acceleration, the time capsule represents a fundamental urge. World Expositions until that of 1939 were oriented toward ordering the world's peoples, or to traveling around the globe vicariously, or to viewing the industries and businesses of the world. It was around 1939 that this view shifted. The accelerating speed of life in the 20th century brought about changes in the nature of our own lives. For example, our very existence in this place became vague and unclear, and the concept of existing in a physical space began to take on different meanings. It is therefore highly symbolic that Wells wrote The Time Machine a hundred years ago, and that Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days even before that, in 1873: the idea of time travel, as opposed to travel over physical space, had come into being through the force of imagination just as our century was about to dawn. Benjamin has said that

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