Science Fiction used to be a popular movement, allowing people to dream about realistic [in theory] yet unreachable [at the time] scenarios. Today is a different story: it’s not an overkill to say that Science Fiction is essentially replaced with Art Science reality. Sure, we don’t have momentary human tele-transportation or energy-free garbage eradication yet; but it’s quite hard to find any single idea, which was Utopian once and still not realized [or at least addressed] in practice these days. AI, VR, “wetware” [bio-tech], ubiquitous communications – you name it – are all around, we use or explore them every day.
The fiction accomplished another [perhaps more important] mission – it provided an enjoyable run away from the current routine reality into the shiny imaginary future. Again, such issues as climate change or social problems had brought an understanding that progress was not a cure, and a future might be more than troublesome. Hence the other tech-savvy “ways out” came on stage – e.g. psychedelia with designer drugs for the brave [and naive], or digital media for the creative. These are basically the same romantic exercises in escapism, but with highly intensified [or even outsourced to computer] imagination, revealing new incredible worlds here and there.
Right now, I don’t have a good enough term for what we are living in – some kind of ‘real fiction’ or ‘fictional reality’? I’m only confident that the current digital creativity has by far succeeded and overcome the stories which we were used to love and read.
Vadim Epstein
Media artist, director, educator, coder, VJ; former IT consultant and casual theoretical physicist, combining serious technical background, strong corporate experience, and vivid creative mind. Has worked in various fields such as net.art and science art since 1996, eventually focused on visual media with stochastic algo narratives.
