In this late-nineteenth-century cartoon, French futurist and satirist Albert Robida imagines a test-tube baby.
This idea was fantastically shocking at the time of this cartoon; then test-tube babies became a real-world, shocking anomaly; nowadays we have adult test-tube children with their own children.
There are hundreds and perhaps thousands of people produced by "test-tube" methods, so many that we no longer consider this effort remarkable, and the chemistry-set term "test-tube" has fallen out of use within the context of modern technical fertility assistance.
So this is archaic futurism that became "reality," and then became archaic reality. This image was created to provoke a futuristic "wow" factor, but, as time necessarily passed, where did that "wow" go? The prescience of it definitely has some "wow" today, but it's not the same "wow" as Robida's original "wow."
One can have atemporality without any "wow," but a deep understanding of atemporality would, presumably, enable us to map the historical changes in "wow" from an atemporal perspective.
How is it that we know when to say "wow"? Is there an atemporal cultural framework from which we can allow ourselves to say several kinds of "wow" at once?
Can creative artists master this apparent confusion and then deploy it in a way that creates a frisson for others?
As critics, how would we know if artists were doing that well, or badly?
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