Exhibition runs until 30 May
Advertisement
FOR 40 years, , has offered a glimpse of the best short films heading to cinemas and festivals 鈥� and recently online 鈥� in the coming year. It has been a reliable cultural barometer, too, revealing some of our deepest social anxieties and preoccupations.
But this year saw science fiction swallow the festival whole, as though the genre was becoming not just a valid way to talk about the present, but the only way.
This was the explicit message of audiovisual presentation by architect Liam Young, much of whose work is speculative. Part of his presentation was an early retrospective of a career spent exploring global infrastructures, what he calls 鈥渁n unevenly distributed megastructure that hides in plain sight鈥� slowly stitched together from stolen lands by planetary logistics鈥�.
Forming a powerful contrast with his past travels (through container shipping, the garment supply chain, lithium mining and other real-world adventures), Young鈥檚 presentation features a utopian future in which humanity sagely withdraws 鈥渋nto one hyper-dense metropolis housing the entire population of the Earth鈥�.
It is the impossibility of this utopia that is Young鈥檚 point. Sci-fi used to be full of such possibilities, but he argues that these days it has become our favourite way of explaining to ourselves, over and over, the disasters engulfing us and our planet. The once hopeful genre ceded ground to dystopia, leaving us 鈥渟tranded in the long now鈥� waiting for the end of the end of the world鈥�.
We have confronted the apocalypse before, of course. Marian Mayland鈥檚 film essay weaves between three imaginary rooms, assembled from stills and short clips from iconic sci-fi films and a TV series: WarGames, Real Genius and seaQuest DSV.
The rooms are uninhabited, cluttered, uncanny and cut together to create an imaginary habitation connected to the outside world via shafts and closet doors.
The WarGames bedroom of 1983 is in a suburban family house, while the Real Genius room is a 1985 California campus dorm and the bowels of seaQuest DSV鈥榮 room is a futuristic nuclear submarine imagined in 1993. All fold into each other to create a poignant, fictional childhood, capturing the effects of cold war thinking on sci-fi-loving adolescents.
Mayland鈥檚 film, which won a German film critics鈥� award at the festival, is exactly the sort of experimental work that EMAF has championed over the years.
Zachary Epcar鈥檚 more obviously satirical sees the calm pace of life in a sunny waterside housing estate turn increasingly strange, as the blissed-out, eavesdropped lines of the inhabitants (鈥淪ometimes I come to in the glassware aisle, and I don鈥檛 know how I got there鈥�) give way to the meaningless electronic gabble and vibration of phones and keyfobs.
If this all sounds rather grim, even hopeless, I don鈥檛 think the selection or even the works individually are to blame. I agree with Young that the problem lies in science fiction: it has ceased to be a playground and has become instead a deadly serious way of explaining our world. And that is fine 鈥� it鈥檚 sci-fi growing up.
But what the artists and film-makers of EMAF have yet to find is some other way 鈥� less technocratic, perhaps, and more political and spiritual 鈥� of imagining a better future.