Argentine artist Gustavo Torres, known as Tumblr user Kidmograph, provides a bittersweet nostalgia for the past’s future that never happened. “In H_M_” (above), we see a figure wistfully staring at a virtual sunset from the mundane world of the real. Why was the past’s depiction of the digital age so much more glamorous than the one we’ve inherited?
From Tron to the work of William Gibson, the children of the twentieth century’s twilight decades were promised a future with a virtual playground to rival the neon cityscapes of Blade Runner. Gibson envisioned cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination” where “A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer” offered an out-of-body, mutable alternative to the physical world. It’s a vision not so different from the holodeck of Star Trek or the eerie sublime of Kidmograph’s tongue-in cheek “TGIF,” in which a smiley face bounces blissfully along an endless grid of nothingness.
In reality, the internet isn’t an out-of-body fantasy we can enter as a place-less place—technology instead penetrates the real world in often ominous ways, and there’s certainly no consent for those who live under its surveillance or suffer as a result of the increasingly abstract global economy. In the 21st century, the prefix “cyber” is most often associated with anxiety and attached to threatening concepts. It denotes a brand of terrorism, crime, bullying, or sexual predation that lies at the fringe of our collective imagination.
Kidmograph’s GIFs return us to that innocent sense of wonder. “∑NT∑R” beckons the viewer to indulge in a surrealist vacation. “[I]” (below) suggests a self portrait as a digital avatar who lives out a consequence-free CGI life. 
But Kidmograph’s cityscapes seem to resolve that frustrating dissonance between cyberspace and urban space in the most strangely satisfying way. In “RFLCTN_TRNL” (top) and “TMBLR_CTY” (below) we see the blissful Grid from Tron married to the morphology of the megacity so accurately predicted in the cyberpunk genre. At times, doesn’t Tumblr feel like an impossibly circuitous, dystopian metropolis? One we all find ourselves lost in from time to time. If you’re up for a cyber-dérive, wander the alleys of cyberspace’s psychogeography in Kidmograph’s work, with tags such as #trip, #cyberpunk, and #retrofuture.
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