W3 – Design Fiction Cont, The Congress

As I said in my previous posts, I really enjoyed last week’s reading on Design Fiction.

I like how it ties together imagination, creativity, science, practicality and sociology.

Last Thursday night I went to a screening for The Congress as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival. I don’t know a heap about sci-fi, and it was a bit more sci-fi than I was expecting.

But it was perfect timing, as after reading Matthew Ward’s article it put a lot of things into perspective.

For example, there were moments where the technological designs made complete ‘social’ sense – technology that could scan people into a computer system and insert them into movies. I think that’s a genius piece of design fiction as the central issue of the film was about ageing actresses who can’t find work for themselves.

It lost me a bit when it skipped 20 years into the future and Robin Wright enters this animated alternate universe. Mostly because I thought ‘why are they animated? What difference does it make that they’re animated rather than live action? If it’s imagined or hallucinated why can’t it just be real figures?’. Maybe that’s because the filmmaker Ari Folman thought it easier or more aesthetically impressive to depict this in an animated world. Or maybe its just bad design fiction.

I personally think it’s just bad design fiction. Why would we need to be animated? It’s kind of cool, but also kind of unnecessary.

Also, Bruce Sterling made the point that bad design fiction would be like seeing people have arms that could flap around and make them fly. Awkwardly enough, that’s exactly what happens late in the film *facepalm*