As you descend the stairs of the Future and Other Fictions exhibition at ACMI, the room narrows into a hall tiled by beautiful old movie posters mostly concerned with representations of the future. Among the obvious screen futures of, say, The Terminator, Blade Runner, 2001, Metropolis, Tank Girl and Mad Max, there are a few tantalising anomalies.
Why, say, is there a poster for The Filth and The Fury, Julien Temple’s seminal, anarchic history of The Sex Pistols, who howled that there was “no future” and who blew through a staid and stagnating mainstream culture in the late ’70s like a brick through a window? And what are we to draw from the reference to several seasons of Stranger Things?
This is, after all, a 1980s period piece in content and form, gleefully and uncannily recreating the bubbling synths and tactile film grain of its influences, thus using cutting-edge technology not to imagine anything new but to better locate and service the audience’s nostalgic pleasure centres. It’s a show that on every level represents the very opposite of the future, and as such, very much represents the cultural present.
Could these have been inserted as references to Fredric Jameson’s “nostalgia mode“, Franco Berardi’s “slow cancellation of the future” or Mark Fisher’s concept of “lost futures”? Work that focused on the sluicing away of possibility from the totalising culture of late capitalism, a system that has subsumed all critique, dissent and alternatives, and which now, through its rapacious, unslakable consumption, precludes any chance at a future itself? For good and for ill, these are not the ideas the exhibition goes into. It does something potentially a little riskier: it chooses to be hopeful.
It does so by focusing on Indigenous, Afro-centric and Pacifika ideas of the future — perhaps an implicit concession that the systems that have come to dominate, that robbed those communities and so many others of their futures for so long, are so battered, stagnant and exhausted as to have stopped dreaming of anything much except the slow degradation of what we currently have.
So in its place, there are the luminous, fluid heroes of Dalit and Tamil artist Osheen Siva’s day-glo Tamil Futures. Nigerian-born US artist Olalekan Jeyifous’ Anarchonauts, a depiction of a future Lagos alive with repurposed technology put to work protecting familial bonds and human tenderness rather than trampling it. The fashion activist collective the Pacific Sisters’ “Kaitiaki with a K; Tauleolevai: Keeper of the Water (Tuna)”, featuring a tusked headdress atop a black ceremonial garb trailed by strands of VHS tape gleaming like an oil slick. There is Hannah Brontë’s short film Birth of Dawn (“There is nothing more science fiction than nature itself”) with its symbolism of waterways and pregnancy, life within life within life. And my favourite, Neomads, a fizzing neon kaleidoscope of a comic, produced by kids in Roebourne in Western Australia’s Pilbara — it’s funny and touching and deeply alive.
The thread through these pieces is made explicit in the dreamy utopianism of “After the End”, which concludes the exhibition. It imagines an Indigenous future not as a return to pre-industrial life but as a synthesis with industrialisation’s inevitable ruins; the oil rigs forming new reefs and island cultures after they bend and snap into the sea, satellites fired into space not to surveil or bomb but to write “ancestors’ stories across the stars”.
It would be pointless and churlish to poke holes in such visions; that’s not what science fiction is for. But I wish the exhibition had done more to connect what we once imagined as the future to what we have now.
Apart from the poster collection and the textured miniatures from Blade Runner 2049, the main engagement with science fiction cinema in the past 100 years is through two video essays, Imagine a World and Reset. Both have fun with the kitsch unavoidable in the genre — a stately few aside, there is nothing so instantly dated as its idea of the future, be it the globular blocks of early 3D animation of the 1990s “virtual reality” aesthetic or the gleaming miniatures of Logan’s Run.
But the blanket surveillance and ever-extending and increasingly opaque corporate control of public life Reset references in The Matrix and Robocop aren’t fun tropes of yesteryear, but our current reality — though I enjoyed its concession that many people would choose to remain in the Matrix, given the option. I just wish that thread had been pulled further. The acquiescence with which we brought about a surveillance state more thorough and inescapable than anything Orwell imagined, all of it in aid of what Lizzie O’Shea calls an “army of cyber vampire squids, relentlessly jamming their blood funnels into anything that smells like it could be monetised”.
And it was strange for the Imagine a World segment to ask why visions of the future, from Metropolis onward, create great slaving masses, sent into the bowels of the city to keep it running, and not interrogate the many, many real workers currently excavating the minerals that make our phones possible, or who cleanse snuff films and child pornography from our timelines. It was also strange to treat their AI-generated voiceovers as a bit of showy fun, and not a genuine threat to everything that made this storytelling possible.
But perhaps that is the point: to avoid the paralysis of the now so as to cleanly imagine a genuine future, to make an exhibition — one that could have been entirely downcast — that is about colour, life and hope. Those images linger most in Future and Other Fictions.
“After the End” leaves us with a rainbow-hued figure in a reflective helmet — they could be a deep-sea diver, an astronaut, or a welder dancing among the sparks of the fossil fuel extraction rigs they’re dismantling. Infused with the present, but unencumbered by it. In the sea and the sky, opalescent and weightless with possibility.
