Envisioning futures: imagining technoscientific worlds in film

Abstract

Films can be seen as cultural projections of technoscientific futures. The ways that technoscience is represented in films may shape the way we perceive future innovations and the social implications of such developments. Films can thus serve as documents to study cultural perceptions of the future. This paper explores how visions of future technoscientific worlds are enacted in films by analyzing exemplary short movies that were created for the first science film festival organized with support of the German federal government within the scope of its “foresight process.” By applying methods from qualitative social research, this paper discusses how the selected films represent the roles of both humans and technoscience in future worlds. Although these films each display different visions of such roles, the analysis shows that they all address the importance of technoscience in future lives and imagine that humans embrace an active role as (self-) entrepreneurs and political subjects within future technoscientific worlds.