Future Perfect Imperfect
They have an amplified power to allure and revolt audiences, with glimpses into technologically fantastic worlds or dystopic societies as the devices to recreate these fantasies, these simulacra become ever more advanced.Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) was a landmark in effects-driven science fiction (or science fantasy as the purists would have it) film just as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was in terms of bringing the genre onto the serious filmmaking agenda…. In turn, our spaces are becoming progressively more cinematic as the future gets nearer and architectural influences loop back and feedback off of these cinematic visions.It’s noteworthy that, as we become steeped in invisible networks of data and information, science fiction environments have become more involved with the augmented and virtual realities of digital space and how we as humans orient ourselves around this shifting relationship with our physical and non-physical habitats.
If we look at movies of the past, the future appeared further away. In the 21st Century, the future accelerates toward us at a dizzying pace—like Neo in The Matrix bending time-space and a virtual city in his wake. We are all living in the future in some way, and no doubt this is reflected in the increasing pre-eminence of science fiction cinema.
Seeing into the future, gazing into that crystal ball, has always been a very human preoccupation and we have never been as obsessed with it as we are now. Millennial pressures pull apart present day certainties and, as they do, we look to invent a future that we can somehow solve. Science fiction films are a useful cultural barometer, a touchstone for the hot button topics of the day. In them, things can be said that are left unresolved and unspoken in the everyday.
The worlds created by science fiction cinema, whether full-blown fantasy or fiction a few degrees separated from the facts of the real world, have always been more about our present than the future they purport to be about. With the blossoming of digital effects, these visions have become increasingly bold, more seductive, visceral. They have an amplified power to allure and revolt audiences, with glimpses into technologically fantastic worlds or dystopic societies as the devices to recreate these fantasies, these simulacra become ever more advanced.
Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) was a landmark in effects-driven science fiction (or science fantasy as the purists would have it) film just as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was in terms of bringing the genre onto the serious filmmaking agenda. But this book really begins in the early 80s, because this was when the modern science fiction film was born. 1982 was a year which saw the seminal movies Bladerunner and Tron released. Both have cast their shadow over our cinematic visions of the future over since. Vivian Sobchack labelled Bladerunner’s look as “future noir�?, a style that updates the urban dystopia, chaos, and sprawl that existed in that earliest and most influential sci-fi, 1927’s Metropolis. Tron has been analysed less, but accurately foreshadowed the growing contemporary focus on virtually-inflected worlds, with its groundbreaking use of computer graphics to create a digital arcade milieu.
This book is about those internal and external spaces, and the subsequent evolution of these environments. Science fiction is peerless as a framing device for our concerns, and the use of software programs to map and texture virtual environments to construct our fictions only enhances its efficacy.
We are in a golden age of building fantasies. These dream makers who construct cinematic images take their inspiration from a myriad of architectural influences, because architects are concerned with the invention and design of space and environments in which humanity can evolve and live in the decades ahead. In turn, our spaces are becoming progressively more cinematic as the future gets nearer and architectural influences loop back and feedback off of these cinematic visions.
It’s noteworthy that, as we become steeped in invisible networks of data and information, science fiction environments have become more involved with the augmented and virtual realities of digital space and how we as humans orient ourselves around this shifting relationship with our physical and non-physical habitats. Films like I, Robot, the Animatrix series, and A.I. delve back into the central paradox of our relationship with technology, or techno-fear and techno-lust. As the environments and machines become more intelligent around us, do we as humans become more insignificant, less unique in the cosmos? Whether the individual film is about genetics, nanotechnology, the nuclear holocaust, race, class, power, or interplanetary war and terrorism, it all comes back to the question of what makes us sui generis. The best futurescapes are created to explore and reflect that fact.
