Philosophy

Jonathan Kopievker watched the film U Are the Universe, which uses motifs from genre cinema to ask existential questions about humanity, man, and the future.

At the heart of speculative creativity and science fiction beats the unanswerable question “What is human?”, playing on the edge, examining the boundaries, exploring the frontiers. What is the demarcation line between man and machine, beast and monster; between natural and artificial, cultured and wild; between the living and the dead, the dead-yet-alive, the undead; what differentiates human from trans-, post- and superhuman, non-human, foreign, alien, demonic, and divine.

The prospects for a Messianic age or an ever-lasting Utopia are dazzling, exciting, intoxicating — but what happens when we sacrifice the complexity of the present for a mythical past or fantastic future? What dangers lie hidden in the promise of an eternal Utopia, realized here, on Earth? How does a new generation of Billionaires grapple with human existence? What does it mean for all of us, and how can we still, with all of that, change the world?

"Aniara" (2018, Sweden) is a cinematic masterpiece, an insightful and philosophical science fiction film, an adaptation of the epic poetry cantos of the same name (from 1956) by Swedish poet and Nobel laureate Harry Martinsson. Eden Kupermintz and Uri Aviv from Utopia interview creators Pella Kågerman & Hugo Lilja

The last one hundred years have been a bloody battlefield of utopias. Is it still possible to imagine a utopian future, and if so, how? Exactly 50 years ago, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a short story that marks the beginning of the answer to this question.

Čapek’s Scifi vision reflects the politics of his turbulent time and we're experiencing the fallout of those violent upheavals to this day.

Already in the 1960s, the first chatbot program Eliza exposed the possibility of human susceptibility to artificial empathy. Studying the history and code of Eliza opened up new realms of artistic creation.

Robophobia or ‘fear of robots’ is a modern incarnation of the ancient fear of the next generation, fear of our own descendants. It can teach us much about our relationship with technology, the means of production, and the act of creation.

Cyborg in search of a heart appeared in the famous masterpiece from the early 20th century - a flashing red light that we have all missed in the last hundred and twenty years