arebyte 2022/23 Programme

Sci-Fi

Science Fiction has been seen as a medium that sparks the imagination and provokes ideas of how life might be in years to come. With these vast opportunities and fantastic dreams, Sci-Fi has also informed and created a narrative of self-fulfilling desires on which our imagination is structured and constructed. 

But the last decades have brought new ways in which science-fiction is perceived, discussed and develops; from a predominantly white cis-male gaze to an opening up of diverse and marginalised authors and narratives, science-fiction as a genre is becoming more fluid. 

Within this timeframe, the world has also undergone drastic changes. From mentality, action, protest, and dissent, to accountability, responsibility and governance, the individual and collective voice - identity - has never been more present. 

Identity has become a node in the expanding network, remixed and meshed with other junctions and connection points until it becomes uncontainable, unmalleable, unfixed. Identity and bodies may now be understood as liquid, forming into the shape of that which surrounds them, but they are also easily taken advantage of, manipulated and fed back into a techno-capitalist agenda. Science Fiction can afford us a reimagining of this future: by seeing that other ways are possible the practice of being “fictional for a while” allows us to “understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people” and thus has the potential to enforce real-life change. 

Global media companies, the general public, corporations, institutions, and everyone in between, are grappling with ideas of the future more than ever. Nostalgia for the past coupled with optimism for the future only exacerbates our suspension in the present.  Fear breeds panic breeds uncertainty:

With big tech evolving exponentially and adapting to the way we connect and communicate, we see transformations in the ways technologies utilise us to their gain. Under the guise of helpful assistance and adapting to our ways of living, we give our smart technology more data, more time, and more of ourselves. With education and healthcare systems under prolonged pressure, we see society in a constant state of upheaval, and a lack of trust in the systems that are in place to support and care for us. With news agencies and media companies controlling algorithms that seek to manipulate our behaviour, we find the truth more difficult to decipher.  

We seek shelter from the barrage of disinformation, corrupt governments, unreliable narrators, and false actors, and succumb to finding solace in small groups, communities, and via avatars without an earthly identification. Attempts towards future planning - with a keen eye towards shifts in thinking around race, class, the environment, and the possibility of future life on Earth - continue to prevail.

For its 2022 artistic programme, continuing on from last year's Realities, arebyte presents artists and artworks surrounding science fiction, science-speculation, and science fact.  

The programme unpicks our current reality and presents an exploration through various forms of speculative fiction(s), proposing imaginative and innovative concepts for a new kind of futurism, and mapping a new realm that we can unfold - a domain that incorporates ways to promote new ways of inhabiting, carving out, and finding spaces to exist within. These areas include quantum ideology, cyborgian prosthetics, performativity within identity, and digital terraforming utilising thorough world-building techniques, as well as others that will unfold throughout the year.

In conjunction with the “real-world-space”, the liminal space is also put forward as an arena to consider ambiguity or disorientation as positive disrupters of the status quo. Within this, the programme adapts to the inherent hybridity of artistic forms and practices within the digital and confronts the limitations of working online and offline in ways that promote multifaceted offshoots. Although partitioned into pathways of exhibition, event, and discussion, the programme offers non-orientable surfaces, a Möbius strip of knotted and intertwined science-fiction inspirations to examine the ways in which the past and the present continually converge, collapse and co-invent each other. 

These varied presentations will offer adaptations of existing conversations around the overarching themes within science fiction; new, old, real and imagined perspectives intersect with interpretations and constructions of Western and non-Western notions of possible futures to further the conversation about inclusivity within the genre. Involving science fiction's main areas of reach - of beings and entities, habitats, technologies, travel, body and mind alterations, and hybridity - the programme grasps onto both earthly and extraterrestrial lenses to centre itself in the ever-evolving conversations surrounding the evolution of human and non-human agents.