To Fracture Time Is to Create an Otherwise brings together artists and writers who use science fiction as both a medium and inspiration to create alternative realities across diverse media. A series of four collaborative artworks are released from June to November 2024 by LAS, with a new project unveiled every two months. Contributors were invited to create imaginaries that re-understand the future as a plural multiverse of world-building possibilities.

The first to be released is a video work by artist Sonya Dyer and writer Rivers Solomon. Entitled Portals, it is a story that follows an underwater odyssey in the Mediterranean sea, touching on histories of attempted and forced migration. In July a work by Chen Qiufan and Yehwan Song is released, which explores lucky charms present in East Asian traditions. It reimagines the charms as used by Gen Z to mitigate climate crises. For the third project, on view from September, CROSSLUCID works with Orion Facey to publish an online choose-your-own-adventure narration that explores techno-mysticism using generative AI. And in November, Herdimas Anggara and Luís Barragán present a project exploring an alien virus that travels between machines and humans and leads them to a form of psychedelic ecstasy.

For To Fracture Time Is to Create an Otherwise, each creative pair was invited by LAS to develop a browser-based artwork, that is, a work that uses digital tools and is attuned to the visual conditions of the digital realm. Each collaborative work challenges the linear progression of time to imagine alternative futures that suggest poetic justice, hope and resistance. As such, audiences are invited to consider how narratives within science fiction dismantle oppressive structures and illuminate paths toward collective liberation and ‘techno-diverse’ futures. To Fracture Time Is to Create an Otherwise explores the social, political and cultural forces in which artists and writers practise their versions of the future, while imagining the consequences of the present as they seek to change it.

As explored in this commissioned series, ‘world-building’ describes the way in which characters experience their surroundings, culture, nature, events or customs. World-building entails a worldview. In the four projects, this literary technique becomes an exercise in subversion: imagined futures that propose radical alternatives and offer collective empowerment and transformation.

Drawing on different traditions, positions and ways of being, the four projects offer a point of departure from hegemonic perspectives on the future. Through the lenses of science fiction, artists and writers imagine technologies, experiences and stories that construct futures grounded in Indigenous, Black, Multispecies and Queer narratives and aesthetics. They position themselves outside, as a counterpoint to Western imaginaries. They celebrate ancient wisdoms erased by colonisation, or create new ones to circumvent the lines of oppression of the globalised, hyper-capitalist everyday. Just as Greek, Roman and Norse myths have underpinned Western art for centuries, artists and writers in Sci-fi develop their own myth-making devices to challenge a canon that rendered them futureless or simply left out of dominant imaginaries.
They imagine ‘techno-diverse’ futures, which acknowledge that technology is embedded in different cosmologies, knowledge systems and cultural practices. Philosopher Yuk Hui, who coined the term ‘techno-diverse’, points out this notion also produces a form of liberation, one that allows each collective or identity to build and control its own technology and thus the discourse around it. If technology is often associated with progress, then the future is also manifold, attuned to each collective cosmology.