Man: Well, welcome to the MTA, the Mojave Test Area of the Reaction Research Society.
-How's it going?
Dimitri.
-American.
-Nice to meet you.
-Nice to meet you.
Hi, America.
Frank.
We've met on the--online a couple of times on Zoom.
American: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Good to see you in person.
Dimitri: Depending what you want for your background, We have some areas over there that might work out.
American: Yeah, we're leaning towards, like... the barren landscape backdrop.
Dimitri: OK.
American, voice-over: My project "The Monophobic Response" is a film project and sculpture work that frames the history of rocket science in Southern California through the lens of Octavia Butler.
I've been a fan of her writing as a science fiction author for a long time, and I started to think more about speculative fiction and science fiction as a way to imagine what other political realities are possible, and with Octavia Butler specifically, I knew that she grew up in Pasadena, California, where I grew up, around the same institutions, like Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, and that just kind of made me think about what her relationship might be to the science community or rocket science.
"Parable of the Sower" was written in 1993, and it's a projection of what the future could look like.
[Siren in distance] Narrator: Saturday, July 31, 2027, morning.
Last night when I escaped from the neighborhood, it was burning, the houses, the trees, the people burning.
[Fire crackling] American: In "Parable of the Sower," the main character is this young black woman, and she's writing her own religion as a way to survive this period of extreme wealth inequality, extreme danger, and climate crisis and disaster.
Butler: The destiny of Earthseed, which is the name of her religion, is to take root among the stars.
Here my character is saying, "Not only is it "gonna be advancing us technologically, "it'll probably keep us from wiping each other out "here on Earth, and in the end, we'll go someplace else."
American: For the project, we created an accurate replica of this 1936 rocket test, and in my film, the Earthseed community is essentially doing that same test.
To me, that's really interesting because the Earthseed community, they aren't private tech billionaires.
Oftentimes when we see rocket science, it's primarily white men that are at the helm and deciding what the future is going to be for all of us, and I really wanted to, like, draw a contrast.
This sort of, like, ragtag group of black and brown people that don't have a lot of resources, and they have a similar desire to leave the planet to escape the climate crisis.
Dmitri: You're looking for more like where, like, Joel and Frank are standing, right?
American: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dimitri: That's the kind of surface you want to see?
American: Yeah.
Dimitri: OK.
Yeah.
-And also for fire.
-Yeah.
Fire suppression, as well, yeah.
American, voice-over: I'm really interested in Octavia Butler's relationship to space exploration.
I think from how I can imagine it, she was of two minds in terms of being sort of innately critical of the colonial impulse of the desire to travel into space and, you know, colonize a place like Mars, but at the same time, I think she was fascinated by it, and so having this ideological battle around what it means to venture into space is really sort of central to the project.
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