I was checking out Flash Art this AM and came upon this article (heavily excerpted below) about the current Orange County Museum of Art California Biennial being heavily skewed towards the science fiction edge of the world. This is really not so new – especially when you consider Robert Smithson’s heavy use of Sci-Fi in and around his work. On the other hand, is science fiction really that far removed from daily life? We now live with moving sidewalks, communicate with telephones that don’t use wires, and now have robots available as vacuum cleaners and pets. So how different are the worlds of science fiction different than what we now live in?
Anyway, I don’t really have a overwhelming point of view here – I just found the article really interesting…
And I quote from Flash Art Online:
“The consensus emerging from the 2006 Orange County Museum of Art California Biennial is that young artists on the West Coast are operating in an idiom closely linked to science-fiction. The concerns that have characterized this genre over the years are all accounted for: the imagination of future and alien civilizations (Leslie Shows); interplanetary and/or time travel (Scoli Acosta); the colonization of, or invasion from, the alien outlands (Pearl C. Hsiung); the encounter with the other (Christian Maychack); the redefinition of the idea of the human in response to the other, either alien or homemade (Sterling Ruby); the technological transformation of the human as such (Andy Alexander); the social functions of disaster, apocalypse (Marie Jager); utopia versus dystopia (My Barbarian), and so on. Even those who strive for a measure of documentary verite (Sergio De La Torre, as well as the collaborative teams Bull.Miletic and The Speculative Archive) employ the everyday as a foil for the strange. Perhaps most significantly in regard to our present moment, that quintessential sci-fi theme of communication breakdown and its inevitable outcome, war, is pervasive.”