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FOR 40 years, the European Media Art Festival (EMAF) in Osnabrück, Germany, has offered a glimpse of the best short films heading to cinemas and festivals – and recently online – in the coming year. It has been a reliable cultural barometer, too, revealing some of our deepest social anxieties and preoccupations.
But this year saw science fiction swallow the festival whole, as though the genre was becoming not just a valid way to talk about the present, but the only way.
This was the explicit message of audiovisual presentation Planet City and the Return of Global Wilderness by architect Liam Young, much of whose work is speculative. Part of his presentation was an early retrospective of a career spent exploring global infrastructures, what he calls “an unevenly distributed megastructure that hides in plain sight… slowly stitched together from stolen lands by planetary logistics”.