Tomorrow Unlimited
Tomorrow Unlimited was a short-lived company I started with a group of friends and former colleagues, which operated during the spring and summer of 2007. I had misgivings about the name almost as soon as soon as we chose it, but I stand by my reasons for it. I wanted our project to stand in opposition to irony and hipster cynicism, and to represent the idealism and optimism I saw in emerging creative forms and ideas. I also wanted it to be big, open, and ambitious. I was riffing in part on a certain kind of grandiose naming style I’d noticed in the design community, as perhaps best exemplified by the British design collective Universal Everything, and on the post-September 11 cultural idea of a new sincerity.
We existed for just under five months before funding was pulled, but during that time we were able to produce a pair of two-day events focused on new forms of creativity, which we called The Creators Series, in New York and Los Angeles, and a daily online editorial destination, Tomorrowunlimited.com. (The previous two links are to screenshots, as are most of the following links, since the sites have been taken down.) I was heavily involved in programming the Creators Series, but my real focus was on the site, which I built with a developer and a designer I’d worked with previously.
The site was what I’d call a blogazine—a hybrid of short-form daily posts that built on other people’s content and longer, more traditional magazine editorial. Feeling that most subjects we’d report on wouldn’t fit into neatly defined buckets of genre or media, I opted for a primary navigation derived from editorial form rather than editorial subject. That is to say, instead of doing something like Film | Music | Art | Design, our navigation consisted of Notes, Reviews, Features, and Sources. This probably reflects my fondness for print, as the site’s structure hewed much more closely to the front-of-book/well/back-of-book breakdown that is the paradigm of magazine publishing than most sites do, but I think this worked well for our purposes.
Notes were our blog section, short topical postings on various films, concerts, exhibitions, and other happenings that occasionally had a quote or two, but always had to bring some context or new perspective to the subject. Samples include a fashion photographer-turned-filmmaker, the music video debut of the son of a famed music video director, magicians and technologists collaborating in Barcelona, a documentary about the rise, fall, and rise of a psychedelic rock legend, and the creative output of art students in China.
Reviews were supposed to be long-form, nuanced, informed, and critical, and could be about cultural events as well as books and movies and albums. A few examples include appraisals of the 2007 Venice Biennale and a special presentation by fashion designer Gareth Pugh.
Features were thoughtfully reported profiles, surveys, trend pieces, and conversations. Two examples include a piece on oddly beautiful environmentally minded documentary filmmaking and another on a collaborative multi-venue video and installation art project featuring 45 artists.
Finally, Sources were meant to be from-the-horse’s-mouth first-person accounts that elucidated something new about the creative process and the speaker. A good example is a piece from Interpol bassist Carlos D on his experiments with film scoring.
All stories had tags describing basic attributes of their subject matter, like fashion and exhibitions, allowing users a focused method of browsing content that was interesting to them beyond basic search. Finally, all contributors had their own pages, allowing users to search by byline, and, theoretically, providing an initial foundation for community features to be added to the site down the road.
