By Smin Smith. This article first appeared in Vector 292.

Defining Science Fiction Art

The term science fiction as critic Adam Roberts states “resists easy definition […] it is always possible to point to texts consensually called SF that fall outside the usual definitions” (2006:1). This makes the process of defining science fiction particularly difficult, especially as an artist. The science fiction art we produce often falls outside of definitions which centre literature, film and television narratives. 

When I started Vagina Dentata Zine in 2015 (a print publication documenting the relationship between fashion and science fiction), I had Norman Spinrad’s definition in mind: “science fiction is anything published as science fiction” (quoted in Roberts, 2006:2). I am particularly drawn as an artist to understandings of science fiction that prioritise multiplicity, and ultimately reclamation. Having been involved in queer, feminist zine publishing for a number of years now, I regularly witness visual science fiction beyond film and television — beyond the “mainstream white supremacist capitalist patriarchal cinema” (hooks, 1996:107) that criticism still prioritises. It seems more important than ever to move science fiction studies beyond these constructs, to let the emergent and more generative science fiction happening on the fringes into academia. 

Here I think particularly of the Afrofuturist legacy, a potent multimedia project that encompassed “the theoretical and the fictional, the digital and the sonic, the visual and the architectural” (Eshun, 2003:301). We do speculation a disservice when we limit its reach. Thanks to the work of multiple artists, zines and journals like Vector, science fiction criticism is finally expanding its remit to encompass the various modes of science fiction art. 

My understanding of science fiction art has also been shaped by convergence culture, a contemporary phenomenon affecting both science fiction and the arts. Transmedia studies of science fiction identify a phenomenon where the “boundaries between media have blurred to the point at which it makes little sense to foreground fundamental distinctions between contemporary media” (Hassler-Forest, 2016:4-5). Narratives are simultaneously built across (but not limited to) films, television shows, books, comic books, video games and toys. 

Similarly, contemporary art necessarily involves a convergence of media, building “a general field of activities, actions, tactics, and interventions falling under the umbrella of […] a single temporality” (Medina, 2010:19), that of the contemporary. For both Hassler-Forest and Medina, convergence has liberatory potential; as Medina puts it “[…] there is some radical value in the fact that “the arts” seem to have merged into a single multifarious and nomadic kind of practice that forbids any attempt at specification” (2010:19). As a fashion stylist once confined to the genre of visual culture, blurring the boundaries of art, science fiction, and science fiction art specifically feels especially productive. 

Samuel R. Delany once proposed that “we read words differently when we read them as science fiction” (2012:153). This essay declares that we read art differently when we view it as science fiction, specifically fashion design and imaging practices. 

Continue reading “Smin Smith: Transmedia Worlding in Marine Serre’s FutureWear” →