Thoughts from “Stage the Future,” part I

Earlier this month, I attended the second annual Stage the Future Conference on Science Fiction Theater at Arizona State University.

Among the artists who showed their work, my favorite was Miwa Matreyek, who does beautiful multimedia animations about the natural world and the human body. And she’s coming to the ICA here in Boston in April:

A newcomer to Boston, LA-based multimedia artist Miwa Matreyek combines animation, video installation, and performance for one-of-a-kind experiences that have appeared at international art centers and festivals including Sundance Film Festival. These two pieces combine stunningly lovely imagery with inventive movement and shadow play for works that are, as she says, ?at once semi-scientific (like flipping through a children?s encyclopedia), emotional, and dream-like, rich in surrealism, metaphor, and fantasy.

I’m definitely going to try to see more of her work. Tickets here.

The keynote address was given by ASU’s Thomas P. Seager, an engineering professor who specializing in sustainability and resilience, aka surviving very bad things. We need theater to teach us the skills required to survive VBTs–improvisation, creativity within constraints, collaboration–and science fiction can help us imagine both VBTs and their solutions. Increasingly, Dr. Seager pointed out, “We cannot predict the future by extrapolating from the past.” Change across many dimensions–climate, social, technological–is too fast and complex for that. We need the discipline and imagination of both science and the arts to move into the future.

ASU is all about that kind of art-and-science integration, which is why the conference met there. Part of what we talked about was the split in SF between utopian and dystopian visions of the future (or, if you’re a Bostonian, of the recent past). Famously, within a rather narrow and geeky definition of “fame,” ASU is where university president Michael Crow challenged SF author Neal Stephenson and his SF kinfolk to come up with brighter visions of the future. The resulting anthology is Hieroglyph. (Here are some good articles about the project.)

More to come …