In 2020, I was invited to delve into news archives from 1970 at Southern Methodist University’s G. William Jones Film and Video Collection in Dallas. I didn’t know what to expect.

The regional coverage was mostly banal: local politics, high school athletics, school board votes, county fairs, a beauty pageant, etc. But the national coverage compelled me. The stories the archives told were resoundingly clear: climate disaster, racially motivated violence, police brutality, poverty, war, domestic violence, housing crisis and voter fraud.

If we could swap the 1970s collars and feathered bangs for whatever’s currently viral, these news anchors, politicians, micro-celebrities and everyday Texans could be delivering us today’s headlines. As I watched, the visible markers of decades past became undone by the direct lineage to present-day struggle. Time became cyclical. When confronted with this anachronism, I could think only in terms of science fiction: that we can imagine a future based only on what the past — a once momentary present — looked or looks like. A temporal rift in the multiverse!

I saw that the figures depicted in the archives could be reimagined as pseudo-divine bearers of a potential truth, transplanted from 50 years in the past and appearing before our eyes to weave a proclamation of impending doom. Yet we are given no directive, no tangible stakes. Only affect. Only poetic decree.

Angelo Madsen Minax is a visual artist, filmmaker and 2022 Guggenheim Fellow.

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