Science and Its F(r)ictions

Three, two, one... blast off! The films in this program play with the notion of “sci fi,” interrogating scientific depictions of reality and inviting us to wonder—where does science end and fiction begin?

Many of these works appropriate educational or medical footage, interrupting anatomical diagrams or depictions of physics with hand-painted interventions; they draw attention to the ways in which the scientific impulse to observe, catalogue, and classify can become absurd. This absurdity can be comical—as in Stan VanDerBeek’s Science Friction—and it can also be alienating, as we see in Lana Lin’s Stranger Baby.

As a genre, science fiction often deals with themes of estrangement, providing us an intergalactic framework through which to confront the problems of our everyday existence.