Science Fiction Double Feature
Catalogue Text
so we were thinking about science and fiction and science fiction, and figured it’d be a good way to thrash out a bunch of ideas we had and get some other people to join in too, of course this was a while ago and now we’ve driven ourselves mad with it all, but we love science fiction even though we know it’s escapist and perpetuates the status-quo by giving us something outside of the everyday that we desire and then when we’re addicted they sell it back to us, and we’re too blinded to think about how little revolution there actually is in the future, but still, it was watching and reading those things that pumped up our imaginations so that we believed we could make something happen, and the lower the budget and the more cobbled together the sets, the more you see what’s really important, that everything is as true as we want to make it, and that the future doesn’t exist, so it’s all about now, the most outrageous plots and aliens are no more fiction than any gritty drama or politicians speech, and science is fiction anyway, it splits everything up into manageable pieces and makes things seem valid by using a method, but art and literature use methods too and no-one thinks they always tell the truth, science is always changing what it tells us: the world is going to be wiped out by a giant asteroid, no it’s alright we could destroy it in time, oh no we couldn’t, oh yes we could, some science accepts the uncertainty, the fuzziness of logic, but what’s always presented in the media is science as a solid, trustworthy authority, white coat = believe, its all acting, and it spreads into fiction, people trust the opinions of actors who play doctors more than those who play killers, and have you noticed how there’s all these programmes where it seems like they’re fiction but everyone talks like they’re real, as well as all the ones they admit are fakes, we’re all losing our boundaries between truth and fiction, which can be a good thing if you are aware of it, and make use of it, but sometimes it gets difficult and you find yourself caring more about who wins big brother than something really important like, like, see it’s getting difficult to say what’s important anymore, we’re getting our information about the world through media which we know are flawed, so we doubt everything and maybe that’s what they want, of course the idea of ‘they’ is another fiction, this conspiracy theory that those in authority are plotting how best to manipulate the masses, which is probably partially true, but as individuals they’re all as fucked up and self-obsessed as the rest of us, but we like to think there’s someone out there fucking with our heads so that we don’t have to face the fact that we’re fucking with our own heads, that we want to believe the lies and that’s why they work, even though we know it just makes us more likely to waste our lives and money if we identify with this film, this computer game, this book, this comic, this album, this computer, this mobile phone, we still do it, we’re still wired to project ourselves outside our bodies into stuff, use a bone, use a phone, and it’s very easy to imagine that art is immune from all this and we don’t have to watch for the same stories here, but of course that’s just wishful thinking and we’re just as likely to idealise our favourite artist as a rock star, believe that something is a good piece of art if we see it in a respected gallery in london, or think an organisation is professional if they produce an orderly, attractive web site.
