INTO THE UNKNOWN
A major new SF exhibition is heading to the Barbican. Go on, have a peek.
Iasked them, ‘What angle do you want?’” recalls Patrick Gyger, the man behind Into
The Unknown, the Barbican’s major new science fiction retrospective. “And they were like, ‘Well, the whole of it! The whole of science fiction!’ I was like, ‘Really? [laughs] The whole of science fiction in one exhibition?’”
Opening this month, Into The Unknown has all the towering ambition of a Saturn V rocket. Spanning books, art, movies, music, comic books and videogames, it explores more than a century of SF, showcasing an astonishing collection of items sourced from across the globe. There are props from Star Trek,
Interstellar and Alien, Star Wars concept art from the Lucasfilm vaults, gloriously lurid 1930s pulp magazines, Soviet space propaganda postcards and original manuscripts by Jules Verne, the pioneer of scientific romance. Other treasures include a prototype Martian created for Ray Harryhausen’s never-made version of
The War Of The Worlds, long thought lost and on public display for the first time.
Add to that new contemporary art commissions, interactive video displays and multimedia installations, including a version of
Blade Runner reconstructed – in a meta-twist that would make Deckard shiver - by artificial neural networks. Accompanied by a programme of talks, debates, concerts and screenings, it’s set to be a sprawling celebration of the planet’s most imaginative and provocative genre.
Gyger’s a lifelong fan. “I was a child when I saw Close Encounters Of The Third Kind in the theatre,” the Swiss writer and historian tells
SFX. “I was quite young, probably a bit too young, but it really enraptured me.”
Science fiction brings us toward the frontiers of what we know
The former director of SF museum Maison d’Ailleurs in Switzerland, he’s produced more than 30 genre exhibitions. Into The Unknown may just be his most challenging yet. “I wanted to show that science fiction is not necessarily what you think it is,” he smiles.
How does Into The Unknown compare with your previous exhibitions?
The scope here is broader. There’s more money and the audience we are trying to reach is broader too. This is a very ambitious project. We’re trying to tell a story and show many, many things from films and books and music and games. And we’re mixing all that with contemporary art. It’s a challenge. It would have been easier to go with one angle – space or robots or the science of science fiction – but that was of lesser interest.
It’s such a huge genre. How did you find your throughlines?
Through a narrative – the idea that science fiction brings us toward the frontiers of what we know and makes us look to new horizons. It drives us toward exploring the world and then going into space and recreating our own world. We’re destroying the world and rebuilding it constantly. I wanted to show how
We’re showing the whole of Blade Runner as dreamt by a machine
this movement in the last century has brought us back towards ourselves. So that’s the idea, and then you have to populate that with items. It’s very pop. Science fiction is popular culture. I’m not saying it’s not high art. I’m saying it’s also – and mostly – popular culture, because this is how it was marketed throughout the 20th century: comics, paperbacks, pulps, big budget movies. So there is a strong sense of pop culture in the show, which I really like.
It’s a remarkable collection of objects. How did you go about sourcing them?
We basically relied on the enthusiasm of people that are in this field that want to share their collections and the items that they have. We went to everyone from The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation to [Microsoft co-founder] Paul Allen, who has this massive collection of items. We also spoke to the film studios and private collectors. There are people who try to monetise the items that they have – we didn’t go down that path.
Do you have favourites?
That’s hard to answer. Having a pulp magazine which was worthless almost as soon as it was released is as important as having an original artwork, because the impact it creates in people’s minds and how transformative it was is tenfold. Having a piece of that magic, in a way, is more important for me than having an original HR Giger drawing. I’m really happy that we have some of those too, but it’s through the work Giger did in Alien that he has touched so many people.
It was very important for me that this exhibition is not an art exhibition. It’s more like science fiction as a cultural force. So it has original artwork from Virgil Finlay, Syd Mead and Léon Benett, who was an illustrator for Jules Verne, but the fact that we have golden age or silver age comic books is also super important. And those were mass produced works. We cannot remove science fiction from its context of production, and the context of production of science fiction is not art galleries and museums. It is mass media.
So you’re democratising it…
It has always been like this. We have to show it like this. It would be ridiculous to just show pulps as the original images that were used for the covers because that is not how people saw them. Virgil Finlay was not exhibited as a serious artist while he was alive. We have to show science fiction as it made an impact on people.
Tell us about the auto-encoded version of Blade Runner you’re showing. It sounds fascinating…
Yeah, it’s a favourite of mine. Basically we’re showing the whole film as dreamt by a machine. The artist that did the piece programmed a computer to watch the film and
retrieve some elements from it. The film is actually a recreation from scratch by a computer. It’s like the dream of the machine, so it’s completely relevant for that film, given the original title of Philip K Dick’s story was Do
Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?. It’s the computer dreaming the film. The film is run as data in the computer and the computer is asked to retrieve and decode and recode elements of the film. So we’re not showing the film but a transformation of the film by the computer. It’s a subtle difference. When the
Blade Runner partnership asked for it to be taken down online, it was rejected – basically it’s not the film. It does involve the original footage but it’s very blurry, as if you were seeing the film underwater. It’s this very bizarre rendition of the film.
Where do you see science fiction evolving?
I’m not very good at predicting. In the late ’80s I thought steampunk was dead. I thought, “Who’s interested in that? It’s boring, pseudo-Victorian stuff!” I still feel there’s not much of interest in it, to be honest! Narratively, conceptually, I don’t think steampunk brings very interesting ideas. It’s a fantasy about Britain’s past, this idea of the grandeur of the empire, which I think is disturbing! [laughs].
For me, simple and subtle ideas like China Miéville’s The City And The City are where science fiction is most interesting at the moment. But I think it has to try and come up with new images of the future. In the past science fiction has created some very striking images of the future, in film and in advertising especially – we have a lot of advertising around the space race, the world of tomorrow, flying cars, things like that. We should hope that science fiction brings in the very near future some very strong and positive images of the future, so it would drive our desire to go there. Not that we would achieve it, but at least
we would try.
What do you want people to get from this exhibition?
I would like people to be inspired, to go back to reading some of the things they have read and reread them, or discover things they haven’t read or seen. We’re trying to show that there is so much out there in science fiction that’s still to be discovered.
Science fiction has been a very powerful tool to try and push us to go beyond. It hasn’t necessarily gone there itself, but it looks in that direction, and that direction is where you don’t usually look, where there’s something you don’t know exists. I would like people to go from this exhibition with the same feeling you have when you read a science fiction book or see a science fiction film when you’re a child, where you’re inspired to create your own stories or challenge what you already know. That would be great.
When science fiction touches us we feel not only a sense of wonder but it also fuels our curiosity. It makes us smarter by making us more aware of what we don’t know.
Into The Unknown: A Journey Through Science Fiction runs at the Barbican Centre from
3 June-1 September 2017.