What are some of the future things you anticipated back in the day? For me it was a bunch of technological stuff to make my art easier and thankfully some tech people had the same idea and actually made that happen! I remember when I was an art student back in the early 90s and we were asked to design our ideal studio. For me it was a room with the typical stuff you need as a visual artist: big windows, space for canvas, easels, and paint, a sink, a sculpture area, plan draws for my drawings etc. But also huge, thin flat screen TVs for entertainment, flat screen computers to work on, and tablets for art.

None of that tech existed in the 90s really, art studios tended to be just plain messy, even high end ones. Spoiler- I have my future art studio vision now pretty much, though I moved out my paints, canvases, and plan drawers from my studio many years ago (I still have them). Back in the day I would go through many sketchbooks. I had Pentel mechanical pencils of different sizes, and different hardnesses of leads for them, I had an eraser that was in a mechanical pencil form too so it would never get dirty and would always be accurate to use, it had a feather on the back so I could flick away the mess without touching the drawing. My pages had plastic clipped onto them so I could work on them without smudging the drawings, and a thin metal sheet under the pages so they'd always be firm. I dreamed of an electronic tablet that would solve all those issues, I even wrote about that when I was at university. And now of course I have many of different sizes.

I remember wanting a smaller more portable record player, then we had cassette tapes, and the amazing Walkmans! Those had their limitations though, and I was happy to finally have a Discman by the late 90s. I was not a fan of MP3 players because I thought the interface was limited and crap. but when mobile phones got better I got one the the biggest colour screen I could get and found a way to load heaps of music and books on it, before iPhones were a thing I was the only one on the train staring at my phone with headphones in my ears. Of course now all that is on my phone which also folds out into a tablet, it has a powerful pressure sensitive pen so I can do all my artwork on it when I want whenever I want, and it was cheaper than the huge Wacom Cintiq screen tablet I bought 20 years ago… Though the Cintiq still functions perfectly, I doubt the phone will last even a quarter of that.

So, lastly: even though tech has gotten a lot more advanced, durability and longevity has gone RIGHT down. tech you could buy back in the day could be expected to have a massive usage life. A lot of tech now is lucky to last 5 years and 10 years is the maximum. That was not something I ever expected. What were some of your future expectations for art technology and did they hold up?

The best off Gunwallace track this week was Antifeatured - Fun retro-future electro. Originally from Quackcast 168 - 26th of May, 2014

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Featured comic: YokokasQuest - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2026/may/11/featured-comic-yokokasquest/

Featured music: Antifeatured - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/ANTI_FEATURED/ - by Locoma, rated T.

Special thanks to: Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/ Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/ Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/

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