ESCATOPIA
Utopian thinking often encompasses the escapist vision to leave behind the civilized world as the troubled and hopelessly contaminated place of modern living. The travel either leads into peaceful isolation of a space capsule or into the purifying spectacle of the apocalypse. The program collects science fiction films and video essays by artists and other courageous futurologists.
DWARF STAR
Mike Kuchar
16MM / 00:19:00 / UNITED STATES / 1974
Kuchar’s imagination flies off the handle as he speculates on the year 600.000.000 A.D. when a divided human race is brought together to confront a state of affairs that include galactic empires, cybernetics, evolution, nature worship, and the biggest atomic explosion the forces of heaven can let loose, all filmed in beautiful color and abundant in visual effects; so, fasten your seat belts for a journey into the far exotic future and the stars beyond.
WITHOUT TITLE
Romeo Grünfelder
35MM / 00:13:00 / GERMANY / 2000
A cubo-futuristic portrait of the physicist Illobrand von Ludwiger and his transcendental imagination of the six-dimensional, unified quantum field theory in the area of serious research into UFOs.
EXCHANGE PROGRAM: GALACTICA/LIFE SPACE
Torsten Z. Burns
VIDEO / 00:14:00 / UNITED STATES / 2002
A fusion between sculptural bodies and space time bodies. Re-imagining one’s life abroad an improvisational space station.
DAVID BOWIE – SPACE ODDITY
Malcolm Thomson
VIDEO / 00:05:00 / UNITED KINGDOM / 1969
David Bowie’s space rock classic about astronaut Major Tom’s eerie experiences in orbit.
IMITATIONS OF LIFE
Mike Hoolboom
VIDEO / 00:20:00 / CANADA / 2000
Mike Hoolboom pillages all of cinema for this epic meta-science fiction, in which future and present are conceived as an endless parade of images. Science fiction as a realm od displaced fears and dreams, a place to imagine the future that is already here.