Sci-fi futures and the production of subjectivities

'Here, then, is a first type of stitch or seam: when science-fiction authors extend, amplify or fabulate with a hypothesis. When what they are exploring is the unexpected manner in which a small difference can produce enormous changes in the way things are and when they pursue and at the same time create the consequences of such a difference. It is then that science fiction becomes a historico-socio-cultural experiment. Like scientific experiments, it gives all due importance to the question "what if?", and to creating the kind of differences that can make a real difference. Like the sciences, science-fiction manages in this case to complicate things, take risks. The counterfactual hypotheses it forges are occasions for learning, whereby the author creates the possibility of envisaging other ways of being "humans" in other worlds - ways that affect their bodies, feelings and thought, so that what we might regard as "normal" becomes material for investigation that the story puts into question.'
Isabelle Stengers, Disorientations

Beginning from Stengers' proposition, Nina Power, The Otolith Collective, Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni engage in a visual conversation on the role science-fiction can play in subverting and expanding our affective and political horizons, splicing their reflections with examples from their own image repertories.