27.09. – 10.10. 2022
“Science is one thing. The facts are something else.”: With this erratic quote from the current Austrian home secretary, one could perhaps also describe “science meets fiction”. But that would probably not correspond to the intention of the festival organizers.
This year’s “Science meets Fiction” festival in Salzburg is dedicated the motto “CLIMATE. CHANGES.” and takes a look into the future. However, this is not about quirky perspective shifts in our view of present reality, but rather about future designs from the science fiction genre that are to be related to the current state of scientific research.
Because the authors of the science fiction genre have often inspired and triggered scientific research of the respective present with their fictitious projections from the future: Would we already have smartphones as we know them today without the Starship Enterprise?
It is instructive to visualize cinematic future dystopias such as “Mad Max: Fury Road”, in which not only water and petrol but also solidarity and justice are scarce commodities and whose imagined future society is ruled by a cult-revered tyrant. Which backward projections and conclusions for the present do we have to draw if we want to prevent us from such a dystopian future – admittedly a fictional one?
The events and the Panel discussions at the Science meets Fiction Festival address such questions. For example, in the discussion “Philosophing with Pandora – Thinking Digital Futures” in which, among others, Peter Reichl, professor and head of the research group Cooperative Systems at the University of Vienna, the technical philosopher Michael Funk and the climate activist Lara Leik discusse the topic “Digital Ecology” to debate questions about the possibilities of a “digital sustainability network”.
Markus Eisl, Professor of Technical Physics at the University of Vienna, gives an overview of the possibilities and tools that are already available to us today through satellite data and satellite communication and what socio-political significance this can have.
The author and climate activist Kamala Kaufmann talks with the Salzburg political scientist Markus Pausch about, among other things, the socio-political consequences of climate change.
The choreographer Cornelia Böhnisch, codirector of the Toihaus Theater Salzburg, is developing the performance “Tilting Moments” for the Science meets Fiction Festival together with the freelance dancer Anna Bárbara Bonatto, which investigates the questions of when the tipping points in systems are exceeded after which they are not controllable any longer. A confrontation with smallest movements that can throw a system completely out of balance.
The documentary “Tomorrow. The world is full of solutions” by Mélanie Laurent and Cyril Dion makes it clear that people have sufficient tools at their disposal of already scientifically developed and existing concepts and technologies to be able to slow down the climate change effectively. Politicians would only have to resolutely fall back on it and act accordingly.
Against this background, the sentence: “Science is one thing. The facts are the other.”, actually has a legitimate meaning.
Unfortunately.
Science meets Fiction 2022
27.09. – 10.10. 2022
Salzburg-town: various locations
sciencemeetsfiction.org
