On re-framing

The patriarchal - and western - hand has a heavy grip on science-fiction. On cinema screens we see the white hero on colonial missions as he fights for earthly control over otherworldly planets. Or maybe he is scaling buildings, bestowed with supernatural strength. Or perhaps the hero exists in a book, in a tale where he has invented an in-demand technology that unlocks for him, and only him, ultimate control and domination of the future.

In 1966 the science-fiction writer Bob Shaw invented slow glass, a glass that captures light within its subatomic particles, only to release it as a perfect image months or years later depending on the glass’s thickness. The speculative material, when viewed away from Shaw’s narrative, is an interesting way to think about the layered temporalities that simultaneously take place in a supposedly present time. The past is fragmented on the present, which is simultaneously a future time from when the image was absorbed into the material. This materiality is overshadowed, however, by men who perpetually project their desires onto the glass. Slow glass is projected forward into a future that men will ultimately control. The man’s grip intensifies into a suffocating hold, that at once enforces activity! whilst ultimately leading towards a static dead-end, as the control he values so dearly causes destruction.

Science-fiction doesn’t have to be about men’s desires and domination. Feminist and non-western approaches to science-fiction provide a different way of looking at the genre. The artist Victoria Sin, for example, describes their use of science fiction as 'a practice of rewriting patriarchal and colonial narratives naturalised by scientific and historical discourses on states of sexed, gendered and raced bodies.’ (1)It would also be amiss to not acknowledge the space science-fiction carves out for black lives. Afrofuturism creates safe space by ‘simultaneously referencing the past and staking a place for black life in the future.’ (2) Science-fiction, when in the right hands - hands who transform it into an accommodating space, hands who nurture, but point out what it gets wrong- is an ethical space which gathers rather than excludes.

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Around again to slow glass. To re-imagine slow glass, is to free the material from a masculine vision. In Shaw’s story, slow glass is never seen as anything but a tool for man - the above dust jacket proving this (it reads: ‘Slow glass could only be of benefit to mankind by enriching life…until it got into the wrong hands!’) The right hands acknowledge its speculative materiality that gathers stories, and places and times.

When considering how slow glass has influenced my curatorial practice, I think of its subatomic particles, agency and ability to absorb images. Throughout the section 'Re-framing Science-Fiction' I will highlight methods used to re-appraise slow glass, but first I must consider the patriarchal science-fiction that created the material.

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