{"id":56407,"date":"2017-12-05T23:34:32","date_gmt":"2017-12-06T04:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hyperallergic.com\/390223\/barbican-centre-into-the-unknown-explores-science-fiction\/"},"modified":"2024-08-26T16:17:05","modified_gmt":"2024-08-26T20:17:05","slug":"a-history-of-science-fictions-future-visions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thatgrrl.com\/site\/index.php\/2017\/a-history-of-science-fictions-future-visions\/","title":{"rendered":"A History of Science Fiction\u2019s Future Visions"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Installation
Installation view of Into the Unknown<\/em> at the Barbican in London (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

LONDON \u2014\u00a0The 1982 film Blade Runner<\/em> imagined 2019 Los Angeles as a dystopia of noirish neon and replicants, robots sent to do hard labor on off-world colonies. It\u2019s a future in which engineered beings are so close to humans as to make the characters question the very nature of life. We\u2019re now just a couple of years from this movie\u2019s timeline, and although our robots are still far from mirroring humanity<\/a>, our science fiction continues to envision giant leaps in technology that are often rooted in contemporary concerns of where our innovations are taking us.<\/p>\n

Patrick Gyger, curator of\u00a0<\/em>Into the Unknown: A Journey through Science Fiction<\/em><\/a> at the Barbican Centre, told Hyperallergic that, for him, science fiction \u201callows creators to look beyond the horizon of knowledge and play with concepts and situations.\u201d The exhibition is a sprawling examination of the genre of science fiction going back to the 19th century, with over 800 works. These include film memorabilia, vintage books, original art, and even a kinetic sculpture in a lower-level space by\u00a0Conrad Shawcross<\/a>. \u201cIn Light of The Machine\u201d has a huge, robotic arm twisting within a henge-like circle of perforated walls, so visitors can only glimpse its strange dance at first, before moving to the center and seeing that it holds one bright light at the end of its body.<\/p>\n

\"Film
Film still from 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em> (1968) (courtesy the Roger Grant Archive)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Most of Into the Unknown<\/em> is concentrated in the Barbican\u2019s\u00a0Curve space, a winding gallery with a high ceiling that permits objects to be stacked to the ceiling. They range from\u00a0spacesuits worn in\u00a0Star Trek<\/em> and Moon<\/em>\u00a0(2009),<\/em>\u00a0to the robot TARS from Interstellar<\/em>\u00a0(2014)\u00a0<\/em>and Ava from Ex Machina<\/em> (2015)<\/em>, to drawings by H. R. Giger<\/a> for the Alien<\/em> series and paintings by James Gurney for his\u00a0Dinotopia<\/em><\/a> books. The post-war architecture of the Barbican is a fitting setting for Into the Unknown<\/em>, with its concrete angles and utopian spirit. In conjunction with the show, Penguin Classics released a series of limited-edition science fiction books<\/a> with Barbican architecture on their covers. The brutalist conservatory<\/a> graces H. G. Well\u2019s The Island of Doctor Moreau<\/em>, and two of the triangular towers appear on\u00a0George Orwell\u2019s 1984<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Throughout the exhibition, niche and popular culture are juxtaposed, chronicling how science fiction emerged as a cultural force in the 20th century. Manuscripts by Jules Verne hold incredible insights into how much research the author put into works such as\u00a0Around the World in Eighty Days<\/em> (1872), and an adjacent display of dinosaur models sculpted by\u00a0Ray Harryhausen<\/a> for 1960s stop-motion shows how, by the mid-20th century, films were using recent scientific knowledge for entertainment. Artwork like Dino De Laurentiis\u2019s storyboard drawings for the Sandworm battle in the 1984 Dune<\/em> (and some nearby concept art by Giger for Alejandro Jodorowsky\u2019s unrealized version), testify to artists\u2019 presence in shaping science fiction. An array of aerospace industry advertisements from the 1950s and \u201960s feature fantastic spacecraft similar to those in Soviet postcards illustrated by\u00a0Andrey Sokolov and Alexei Leonov (a cosmonaut\u00a0who created the first artwork in space<\/a>).<\/p>\n