Video
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
- Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (1965)
5D Institute, in association with USC, presents a groundbreaking festival, The Science of Fiction.
Join us in celebrating the new creators of our media future. Experience a live & interactive demonstration of the power of World Building to create narrative resolutions for an evolving media landscape.
The Science of Fiction will move beyond tired binaries to present a one day World Building event. Teams that include leading theorists and practitioners from a wide spectrum of creative and scientific disciplines will join with young innovators who are working on the bleeding edge. Using the narrative design principles of World Building, these revolutionary minds will work together to create an alternate visionary world, a near future reality that could lie just around the corner if only given the right impetus. This unprecedented event will launch a unique and persistent world designed to evolve through continuing transmedia projects at USC and 5D Institute.
This immersive festival will give our in person and online audiences the opportunity to participate, provoke and parse the process through integrated social media. 5Di: The Science of Fiction will be live streamed and video archived. The present and future leaders of our cross media landscape will leave this festival with a first-person perspective on the strategies, technologies, and creative development of narrative media through World Building in the 21st century.
Attendees will also be able to enjoy Evidence - a World Building mediated exhibit; Hunger In LA a real-time immersion into a virtual documented world by artist Nonny de la Pena; all day (Science of) Networking; and an evening performance - Sound of Fiction featuring some of LA’s top musical innovators taking the stage at Bootleg Theater to close the festival (separate entry).
The event was a resounding success. Please see the UStream and Dio archives for reference and tune in here to the site for follow up discussions, links to presentations and information about future events.
Schedule
Teams will convene in their assigned working spaces in the SCI Building by 11:00am
Each working group will engage with a specific theme, each of which is in turn networked to the larger entirety of a shared world. The process is akin to a sophisticated ant colony in which each group has a role to play in creating one entire colony.
Closed session with 25 youth participants, ages 9 to 15
Teams and Audience will reconvene in the Norris Theater by 16:15
First, presentations by core members of each of the six world building groups (including Graham Smith and team presenting the work of the Youth Group). Then: Synthesizing the World: reflections on the science of fiction and world building.
Groundislava, Ben Stokes, Scott Pagano, Ryan Heffington & Co.
Image from Fantastic Four vol. 1 #51, “This Man… This Monster”, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. June 1966 via: fajrdrako.tumblr.com
