Swiss historian and writer Patrick Gyger is the guest curator for the Barbican’s ambitious new science fiction exhibition, Into the Unknown, which runs from Saturday 3 June – Friday 1 September 2017. Amid the preparations for the event, Gyger sat down with Paul Simpson to discuss his own background in science fiction, and the philosophy behind this exhibition…

With the graphic design for the exhibition, how much input do you have? Do you give them an idea of the feel that you want?

It depends on the project. Here the marketing team is a separate team from the team producing the exhibit, but I was part of the people choosing who we wanted to go with, and they paid much attention to the type of graphic design. The campaign and the posters I’m happy with.

It’s very difficult, as you know very well; it’s very easy to be very kitsch or very conventional, or dull, or ironic. This is not an ironic show. It’s not a discursive show on anything else than science fiction. It’s science fiction in itself that interests me. I didn’t want to go into the science of science fiction, or things like that – they’ve been seen before and I thought it was about time to do a show on the topic. The poster and the campaign has to be on the topic, not too kitsch, not too far from what people think is science fiction either. I would love to see a Jules Verne manuscript as a poster, but that’s not going to sell the show very well.

They have created four separate images, one for each section of the show: Extraordinary Voyages, Space Odysseys, Brave New Worlds, Final Frontiers, and the main campaign is going to be around space of course. It’s always going to be around this perspective with this tiny character or characters –how they are in front of a very wide, unknown environment and they are ready to explore. This is what science fiction does: drive into this realm of the unknown and push the horizon further away. It’s going beyond what is known. The campaign does that.

What is really interesting is that in a very traditional analogue format: it’s not a digital image. The tiny character in a spacesuit is someone in a spacesuit photographed and then the image is recreated and repositioned inside the structure, a massive space environment, which is a 3D printed thing with LEDs that’s inside a tank. Then they put inks in the tank – like [the way] in the 1970s they used to do those special effects. It’s done in the same way to recapture that feel.

You’re going for the tangible factor, rather than CG which can go too far.

We see that in some films where you can see that the actors have no idea what is going to be around them!

I think now because of the technology we have, there are ways to bring that back inside film. For instance, we have an installation here by Territory Studios, the firm who did all of the screen images in The Martian – as soon as you have any sort of screen, it’s Territory. They provide actors with those screens on iPads or all kinds of things, which react to the actors’ touches for real; it’s not just a blue-screen. There’s more interaction. The piece we’re going to show here is the same: there are screens and when you push something, the screens are going to light up like you are in some NASA mission control type of thing. It’s not overly ambitious – it’s not a theme park ride – but it shows how you can approach filmmaking in that sense.

What was the first science fiction book or film you read or saw?

That I saw was Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind when I was quite small, probably six or seven, at the cinema. I was quite impressed by it, probably a bit scared also. Then after that I was mostly interested in books, literature – The Martian Chronicles, a lot of Bradbury when I was eight or nine, then I moved towards Van Vogt, and then Orwell, and many others – Silverberg, Stapledon – then into more challenging things like Samuel Delaney and Vonnegut, Norman Spinrad, the new wave Ballard and all that. Even though I’m very interested in film, I’ve always been more interested in literature personally. This is where, I think, the ideas are conveyed and expressed in a more structured way. There is only so much you can express in a film which is obviously a more visual trip than anything.

And it’s more or less the author’s undiluted vision as well, which you don’t get in films…

People forget that film is teamwork, and there are massive studios around. People in film, their life is frustration. They can never express what they really want to express.

Were you reading in French translation or in English?

At first in translation and then in English – and also I was reading other things in French from French writers: Stefan Wul, Michel Jeury, other interesting writers in France.

What about graphic novels – they were much bigger there then, I’ve always understood…

I think the French contribution really at that time are those graphic novels, and they were for me very important. We know that they massively influenced cinema – the story of Jodorowsky’s Dune and how the storyboard circulated everywhere. Moebius, H.R. Giger and all the people around Metal Hurlant, that was massively important, striking also.

People in Britain and America tended to look down at “comics”…

Graphic novels were less popular here. When you’re 13 and you read Incal, written by Jodorowsky and drawn by Moebius, it blows your mind. It was very much inspired by Philip Dick and people like that but there were no films at the times that were as visually impressive as that.

The technology wasn’t there then.

It’s there now but unfortunately there’s this massive nostalgic approach to the field where either the franchises are rebooted or there are sequels… even really interesting films like Midnight Special, they go back to paying homage to 1970s Spielberg science fiction kind of films.

It’s difficult to find films that bring up new images of the future because the generation of filmmakers in their forties and fifties, they were raised on 1970s and 80s films. Possibly Blade Runner 2049 is going to be interesting, but it’s going to take an 1980s visual approach for sure.

There are smaller films that come up with strange ideas. Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color is very strange. I’m not sure he comes up with visions that are different but he for sure comes up with very strange ideas. Even now that’s very unusual.

But in the 1970s, some of those films were already recycling aesthetics from the 1930s and Spielberg/Lucas were massively influenced by the pulps.

So how did you get involved with this exhibition?

The Barbican International Enterprises is part of the Barbican that creates those touring shows, and they try to be quite ambitious, combining pop culture elements and current arts, and be quite broad in their approach to arts and culture. Because I run a national arts centre in France, and my background is also in science fiction and I used to run a museum dedicated to the genre, they thought I would be the right person to do it.

They approach people and ask if they think it’ll be a good idea and I said, “it’s a good idea to do a show on science fiction, but if I were to do it, I would only do it like this”… and I wrote a few pages. They said ok. I said “I don’t really have the time” but it’s the Barbican!

It was very important that the show wasn’t just a collection of items from all sorts of realms. There are thousands of collectors out there. What was and is very important is to have a narrative – that’s the exhibition – and the narrative has to be accompanied  by iconic items which makes it an exhibition and not a book.

Our narrative is: science fiction is a genre that takes you on a journey of exploration. It starts, at least for the sake of this exhibition, in mapping the world and filling out the blanks on the maps. When those maps are filled, we go under the sea, we go into the earth – where you obviously find dinosaurs because that’s where they are – and when you have mapped all those jungles and gone under the sea and the world is covered, you keep on going outwards into the air, and then towards the moon and then towards the stars. It’s this movement of trying to map the world, control your environment while mapping it, and finding the lost race, or the alien race.

The second chapter is about outer space: after Extraordinary Voyages you have Space Odysseys, and that’s more classical science fiction from the early 20th century until the 1970s, and it stops more or less when reality catches up with fiction.

in the very new wave, Ballard and Moorcockian way, we go back when we discover that space is too big and too complicated to explore and becomes a cliché. We find new ideas in rebuilding our environment. This dystopian/utopian perspective, end of the world, playing with our own environment and controlling ourselves and society – that’s Brave New Worlds.

One we have created this upward movement, we go back to ourselves, and the last, for now, bit of exploration is within ourselves. So it’s journeys inside our bodies, journeys inside our mind, mapping our mind, creating duplicates of ourselves – those frontiers which are finding ourselves in the  future and past, time travel.

This whole journey is taking us back towards ourselves, and it’s the mirror that science fiction has always been showing us.

I often use the example of Blade Runner. The film is supposedly about replicants and artificial humans but what we keep from it is the architecture and the vision of the city of the future. When you have Blade Runner, do you put it in the last section or where?

Out of interest, do you think Deckard is a replicant? There’s going to be an answer in the new movie but what do you think?

Not in the book but it depends which cut you see. I’d hope so. I think he is – in one of the cuts, he does dream of the unicorn and then his partner leaves a unicorn. I think it’s pretty clear and it makes it more poignant. The fact that you don’t know who you are-  that’s the point of the whole film, so it makes more sense if he is a replicant.

Of all the items that you’ve brought for this, what’s the piece you most hope people will find interesting?

[long pause] That’s a tricky question.

What item piqued your interest most when you discovered it?

There’s not much I discovered for this show. I think Blade Runner autoencoded which is Blade Runner dreamed by a machine, is quite impressive. Or the Sunspring short film which is written by an AI.

Those are two really important works but then there is work by HR Giger, and the Harkonnen chair from the Dune movie. Jules Verne original manuscript; other manuscripts…

But for me in a way, pop culture items like dolls or comics are as important as pristine items from a film. The iconic spacesuit from Alien is interesting and great to have it there, but what has influenced people most are those items that everybody had in their hands. For me, it’s having a toy robot or a comic from the 1950s – we have Golden Age superhero comics – that for me is as important as having an artist’s work.

For full details of the exhibition and the associated events, click here

Thanks to Anna Dabrowski and Mia Florin-Sefton for their assistance in arranging this interview