Again I found the beginning of this lecture difficult to follow, and I wasn’t really sure where it was going, however I managed to pickup the thread of it after a few minutes. It was basically a repeat of the intertextuality lecture but based around Science-Fiction this time.
What I did find really interesting is the concept of “controlled environments” – humans trying to shut out anything unexpected. This is a common theme in Sci-Fi films, and in the films it normally leads to the technology, which the humans have been using so efficiently within their controlled environments in order to make their lives easier, becoming more powerful than the people and taking over. This represents a current fear, as our technology constantly advances. One of the first films that use this idea as a theme is Metropolis. There’s also the Time Machine, the Matrix and God knows how many more.
What interested me about this, is that I recently watched video about the Venus Project. The Venus Project is a theory and potential “controlled environment” invented by a guy called Jaques Fresco. To me, it seems like total bullshit, but a lot of people have bought into it. If you want to check it out this is the website: http://www.thevenusproject.com/ The guy reckons we can live without money, work, and pretty much everything else- the place would be a sort of Garden of Eden in the middle of the sea. God knows what we’d do with ourselves all day. The Venus Project claims to tackle many problems, such as violence, crime, and, interestingly the fear/possibility of technology overthrowing humans. However, this controlled world, isolated from the rest of us, appears to me to be one huge step closer to the world of Metropolis, and somebody is actually trying to make it happen!!
Something else intriguing is how fascinated we all are with this concept – enough to conduct and watch voluntary human experiments with it. Big Brother, a concept taken from the book Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell), is an enclosed environment controlled by a voice. The voice comes from an unknown source, but it is clear that the owner of the voice can see every action of the subjects. I have always wondered how Big Brother was so popular for so long, but I guess it’s because it represents a real current fear, the same fear as many Sci-Fi stories use as a theme.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf1gZxmIDKw – a link to an interview with the man behind the Venus Project
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