Syd Mead

Syd Mead was first and foremost known as an industrial designer and concept artist whose work was marked by speculative and futuristic sensibilities, but his influential contributions to cyberpunk’s visual aesthetic include the light cycles in Steven Lisberger’s TRON (1982) and the seemingly permanently nocturnal city depicted in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), a seemingly endless city whose corporate neon-laden verticality is imbricated with chaotic multicultural street-level anarchy. It was Mead’s vision of Los Angeles circa 2019 in Blade Runner that has since colonized—foreclosed even—urban imagination across sf audiovisual media. From film and television to short film and digital graphics, to video games, there are very few futuristic visions of the city which do not evoke, consciously or subliminally, Mead’s contributions to the images of LA’s urban sprawl. On the other hand, this chapter also shows that the shining city and the dystopian metropolis, with all their accouterments and consequences, never truly reconcile in Mead’s work. Instead, while cyberpunk aficionados love to claim him as their own, in the grander scheme of work Mead was very much a happy utopian.