What
Abstract: arts media and popular culture have long had significant impact on societal visions of futurity. They have guided what social constructions we come to expect about our futures – from u- to dys-topia. The also provide cultural references that are touchstones with which we can communicate – they form a common language of fiction that allows us to describe and interact with our environments and each other when direct address is too painful. The shared, pseudo-Esperanto language of pop culture celebrity, fiction storytelling, and memorable images and sounds is one which we learn implicitly as we navigate the ever-changing, always-tumultuous narratives and projections of data and culture onto the future. In this paper, I examine different “citations” of major works of science fiction – or other genres that present futurity at their center – from the lens of the lessons that the readings from this semester have taught me. I will address AI bias, technoableism, colonialism and extractionism in space, social class determinants in power differentials and wieldings, Afrofuturism, Indigenous environmental practices, horizon worker heroes and tropes, identity representation in science fiction media, and related concepts from our class.
How do futurism and futurity – imagining that there is a critical difference – function in science fiction? Is science fiction an aesthetic, a set of tools, a series of goals, a genre, an ideology, a spiritual practice? I would like to use some of the anthropological perspectives we’ve learned about to examine the use of science fiction in the full spectrum of arts as a social motivator of attitudes towards the future. How does futurity as it is fictionalized in science-questioning or -inspired literature, music, film/media, dance, visual art, etc., form and manipulate public sector views of futurity in social consciousness? How do our fiction or abstract media and mediums influence how we as a collective conceive of the future? Who controls these mediums and narratives and why? How does who they are affect what they have to say and therefore what we consume into our feelings and ideas about the future and uses of science to craft future? Are these moral, descriptive, or proscriptive, or purely imaginative directives?
To answer these questions, I am going to examine 4 different art or popular culture objects that might fall into the genre category of science fiction, which all express different anxieties and hopes about the future. I will imagine how their functional influence on social life is intended (or not) to sway public opinion and behaviors regarding creating or ushering futurities. These art objects are:
Revolt 1680/2180 – Virgil Ortiz (installation/visual art)
The Deep – clipping. (recording arts/music)
Metropolis – Fritz Lang (film)
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (novel)
These are taken from a larger list I considered, which includes the following titles, not all of which I would consider very good art, but certainly culturally influential:
Ballet Mechaníque – George Antheil
Bladerunner – Ridley Scott
2001: a Space Odyssey – Stanley Kubrick
Sun Ra Arkestra – Sun Ra
The Last of Us – HBO, Craig Mazin, and Neil Druckmann
ET the Extraterrestrial – Steven Spielberg
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space – Umberto Boccioni
Mothership – Mason Bates
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
The Dispossessed – Ursula K LeGuin
Switched On Bach – Wendy Carlos
Soylent Green – Richard Fleischer
Lost in Space – Irwin Allen
The Matrix – the Wachowskis
Black Panther – Ryan Coogler, Marvel Studios
Don’t Look Up – Adam McKay
The Martian – Andy Weir
Nope – Jordan Peele
Interstellar – Christopher Nolan
Ancient Aliens – the History Channel
her – Spike Jonze
Ex Machina – Alex Garland
Arrival – Denis Villeneuve
The Body Snatchers – Jack Finney
Contagion – Steven Soderbergh
Many of these fall into several categories:
Dystopia (either broad or concerned around specific areas of oppression by identity)
Revised History
Speculative
Alternate Reality
CREATE GRAPHIC *****
I chose mostly works that were enough within the popular consciousness to prove markedly influential on people’s cultural expectations of the future. No matter what the medium or visibility, these works were overwhelmingly concerned thematically with human frailty, folly, or susceptibility to downfall. There is a degree of violence in all of them. Ortiz transposes the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 to the year 2180, imagining what would have happened had that original revolt been successful for longer than the 12 years the Spanish were driven away. clipping. imagines a similar revolt against climate change by the deep-sea-dwelling descendants of Africans thrown overboard in the Caribbean during the Middle Passage. In Atwood’s novel, a theocratic extremist group has overthrown the US government and brainwashed the female inhabitants into a system of ritualized sexual slavery, in which social value is placed entirely on uterine fecundity – yet there remains a small group of resistors whose existence is as shadowy as it is incredible. Fritz Lang’s film concerns the revolt of the masses against the upper elites in a bifurcated future society where the lower classes quite literally live below the surface of the earth.
Futurism in the art world is also inextricably linked with modernity and questions of how it correlates to or contrasts with modernism. Questions also come up about what is science fiction versus speculative, futurist, modernist, postmodernist, etc. How much science does there actually need to be if a book is simply set in space? How much speculation does there need to be in order to turn a research paper into a work of poetry or fiction? Researcher Anna Vaninskaya (Senior Lecturer, University of Edinburgh) offers the following description of Western science fiction as a genre:
“Many of the [European] genre's hallmarks appear in the socialist, anarchist, feminist, and conservative utopias, dystopias and romances of the time. In the first half of the twentieth century in Britain, David Lindsay, W. Olaf Stapledon and C. S. Lewis developed the genre along philosophic speculative lines, while Aldous Huxley and George Orwell contributed to the tradition of science fictional dystopias. In America, the pulp magazines of the 1920s–1930s simultaneously popularised and ghettoised the genre, and the technological progress-focused ‘Golden Age’ writing of the 1940s and 1950s cemented the association between science fiction and Americanised modernity and mass culture…
… However, other countries, such as France, Germany and Russia, also produced thriving indigenous traditions of science fiction, which both followed and diverged in significant respects from the Anglophone line of generic development. Evgeny Zamyatin's We (1924), a stylistically innovative anti-totalitarian dystopia that was influenced by Wells and in its turn influenced Orwell, is only the most famous product (in the West) of the Soviet science fictional flowering of the 1920s…”