Downplaying many of the technological associations with the science fiction literary and cinematic genres, Science Fiction 01 focuses on works dealing with more subtly speculative and social aspects of science fiction – projections on what might or could be in the future, as well as considerations of idealized and dystopic space.

In keeping with the theme of speculation, a number of the works in the exhibition exist in their proposal stage or as works in progress, not to take their final form until some possible later date. For Kate Sansom’s Nothing Is Free In Waterworld, the artist transforms part of the gallery into a working office space with the aim of acquiring the now-derelict floating McDonald’s restaurant from Vancouver’s Expo 86 world fair, intending to put the structure to some productive use. Artists Nicole+Ryan, Håvard Pedersen, and Mark Nakamura similarly make proposals that to varying degrees implicate the gallery in the process. Nakamura’s Back In Five promises the return of someone, likely a gallery staff member, perpetually five minutes in the future.

Works by Brady Cranfield, Robert Filliou, and Holly Ward play on spacialized and historicized aspects of the genre, touching on future or alternative versions of the nation-state, revolution, and war. In Cranfield’s video Daydream Nation, two images of the artist are seen listening and contemplating the Sonic Youth double-album by the same name on a Sony Heavy Duty CD Radio, “(b)uilt with the workshop or jobsite in mind”. Filliou similarly uses a double image of himself – connoting some temporal rift by way of media – a video image of the artist barking instructions to his other-self. Filliou later muses, “The spirit of a nation is incomprehensible, but a spirit of a nation and a spirit of a nation is war, or what you will…” Ward touches on both the utopianism of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome patterns as well as HG Well’s somewhat foreboding 1933 chronicle, The Shape of Things to Come, a history of the world written from the perspective of 2106.

Science Fiction 01 is the first of roughly 88 science fiction-related exhibitions planned for the Or Gallery over the course of the next 260 years.

Downplaying many of the technological associations with the science fiction literary and cinematic genres, Science Fiction 01 instead focuses on works dealing with more subtly speculative and social aspects of science fiction – projections on what might or could be in the future, as well as considerations of idealized and dystopic space.