When you're in Amsterdam make sure to stop by the Netherlands Institute for Media  Art--it's free with your museum card and during the Stedelijk hiatus provides the one of the only contemporary counterpoints to the works of the Dutch Masters which you probably would have exhausted yourself with.  The current exhibition there, Into the Unknown, is a hyper-contemporary look at the translation of science through art and science-fiction.  Give yourself plenty of time to have a seat and watch the films in their entirety, kick up your feet and blast off into the future or at least the future-present.

The secret to Kempinski by Neïl Beloufa is written on the wall just below the projection, "The Future in the Present Tense", but it takes a moment to realize to what it refers.  The film shows people in what you could imagine as future world with infinite possibilities, testifying of technologies that allow the immediate gratification of all their desires, of telepathy and teleportation, yet their surroundings are in mysterious jungles and courtyards in Africa, far from the popular visions of the future we are accustomed to.  They are speaking of their visions of what the future could bring, yet phrasing it in the present tense, "In this world I can..." instead of, "In this world I will be able to..."

In Persijn Broersen's and Margit Lukács' film we hear the narrative of a fictional scientist as he describes his search for life on other planets.  His story is accompanied by the artists' vision of far away planets, desert landscapes, long plateaus, and computer graphic interventions of floating rocks--meant to be the form of the silicon-based lifeforms the scientist predicts finding.  As the story develops we find that it is less about life on other planets, but a story of obsession and escapism.  The camera suddenly pans over the scientist's dismal apartment, in his face a deep sadness.  We learn that he has isolated himself in the observatory; while there he dreams of social interaction on his own world, and when out in the world dreams only of the observatory and his far-away planets, the data streams and their implications of other life-bearing planets.  The film is titled Manifest Destiny, a trenchant commentary on the urge to discover and conquer at the expense of life at home.

The most science-y films are from Semiconductor, who interviewed scientists about  the edges of scientific discovery in Do You Think Science... and rendered their metephoric descriptions of electro-magnetic fields into a striking visual work called Magnetic Movie. It's like NOVA by artists, with marvelous and compelling graphics revealing the unseen movements of magnetism accompanied by the fascinating testimony of physicists.  The interpretation of the invisible or un-hearable is further explored by r a d i o q u a l i a in a sound piece that renders the sounds of stars into listenable radio frequencies.

The works in the exhibition indulge in our fantasies of other worlds and scientific speculation, and yet there is a remarkable thread in many of the works exploring the very nature of imagination, the impetus behind discovery and other worlds present on our own planet.  Instead of visions of the future, they present certain limitations of the scope of our vision, revealing more about our present and past.  In other words the future is now, or maybe it was even yesterday.

--Natalie Hegert

(*Images, from top to bottom:  Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács, Manifest Destiny, 2009, HD, 17' min.  Mark Aerial Waller, Superpower - Dakar Chapter, 2004, 1 source DVD installatie, kleur, geluid, 14' min.  Semiconductor, Do you think science..., 2006,  DVD, kleur, stereo, 12'15'' min.)