Where great science fiction once strived for realism, the most daring sci-fi of our times recognizes the destruction of the real that an increasingly scientific culture has given us. It tip-toes or careens along edges that are constantly redefined --- temporal and spatial limits perturbed and mangled by a formless future constantly colliding with an unprepared present.
The most daring sci-fi our times sits uncomfortably close to the present, so close that we can hardly determine what is fictitious about it. Simultaneously, it may liberate itself from temporal constraints and aesthetic convention so throughly, that it's uncanny features become the living face of a new narrative ; a narrative transmuted into 'real' environment, it's content indistinguishable from natural phenomena.
Meta-sci-fi is disruptive and does not clarify narrative for comfort. It confronts viewers with vast unknowable puzzles and the inability of agents within those puzzles to know anything with intellectual certainty. In this new cinema, Beyond the meta-frame of action and progression, is the void, and it is not vacant, but filled with vast intelligence that language and aesthetics struggle to illustrate.
The new sci-fi assumes the impossible to be manifest, somewhere. It takes for granted the alien-ness of the ordinary and it does not seek to reduce complexity for the sake of convenience. this new sci-fi reminds us that we can already feel the edges of the singularity IN THE PRESENT NOW ... that any sufficiently remarkable AI would choose to "fail" the Turing Test.
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1. The time and place of this new sci fi is not always clear, it is not clear because time as we know it has been splintered by cinema --- sacrificed by science.
2. The only realism it strives for is a kind of meta-realism to capture the surreal, the absurd, the augmented reality that like test-subjects we are exposed to willingly or unwillingly in this era of transcended limits and bio-tech fluidity.
3. This new sci-fi celebrates disruptions, chaos, and the breaking up of what is recognized as an inherently oppressive madness lurking out in the open, distraught sleep embrace by overwhelmed populations in the post-AI world.
4. This new sci-fi rejects the premise of art as purely commercial spectacle misinformed by state sanctioned militaristic fetishism.
5. New sci-fi is psychonautical , meta-symbolically , effortlessly philosophically. It is merged with the erotic allure of spectacle, but is simultaneously self aware of it, embracing the nihilistic love of the unsure present left in its wake.
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META-SCI_FI FEATURES ////
Tekkon Kinkreet
Solaris
Chronopolis
Stalker
Videodrome
Naqoyqatsi
Mindgame
Akira
Holy Mountain
2001 : A Space Odyssey
Ghost in the Shell