16TH ANNUAL SCience New Wave FESTIVAL

OCT 20-27, 2023
NEW YORK

WELCOME TO THE SCIENCE NEW WAVE

After 15 years of the Imagine Science Film Festival, we are now the Science New Wave Festival, reflecting all the excitement, diversity, and fresh ideas of a new and growing film movement. The Science New Wave crosses disciplines and cultures, hybridizing genres and ideas into previously unseen forms. The 64 films in this year's festival, which runs October 20 - 27, 2023, and includes 3 world premieres, 21 U.S. premieres, and 24 New York premieres, reflect just as many very different expressions of Science New Wave ideals.


THE THEME OF SCIENCE NEW WAVE XVI IS (ART)IFICIAL

In just the last year, we've witnessed a rapid shift in the technological landscape, as machine-learning-trained neural networks, many fueled by the launch of GPT4 in March, spring into previously barely-imagined roles in communication and image-making. But with new technology comes new pitfalls, as artificial intelligence intrudes into fields previously thought immune to automation, artists question the ethics uncompensated training data, and theorists warn of the implicit biases that may be learned from those same data sets. In the film industry, protections against loss of jobs to AI are central to the ongoing writers and actors strikes. At the same time, many see possibility: whether in freedom from dull tasks, in taking control of and licensing their own digital likenesses, or in leveraging generative algorithms to create new and unseen forms.

But artificial intelligence is but one meaning of (art)ificial, however timely. The (art)ificial is also the domain of virtual universes, new cyborg sensory apparatuses, harsh environments transformed into verdant gardens, and uncanny amphibian puppets. We constantly modify both our surroundings and ourselves, by design or carelessness, even as we minutely quantify and recreate all that exists, whether to preserve or to exploit. In the accelerated technological and social field of this third decade of the 21st century, we may find both the artificial and the (art)ificial in all that we undertake.

THE FESTIVAL OPENS IN THREE WEEKS

This year's festival not only celebrates cutting-edge hybrid science film in 28 programs at the centrally-located Cinema Village in Manhattan, but also evenings devoted to new Science New Wave works-in-progress, field notes as scientific and film-making tool, and the latest edition of our Symbiosis Competition, which each year challenges pairs of scientists and filmmakers to create new genre-bending works over the week of the festival. The festival opens on Friday, October 20 with a quintessential Science New Wave double-feature: thoughtful but electrifying Moroccan science fiction feature Animalia, followed by an utterly original and many-layered exploration of hearing, deafness, the tactile properties of sound, and the richness of all of our sensory experiences, creative documentary The Tuba Thieves. From there, we'll delve into the lives of houseplants, moths, and minerals, stroll through digitally-scanned cathedrals and dance across laboratories, and perhaps even fall in love with surgical robotics.