HOTEL BAIKONUR

2020

Hotel Baikonur is an attempt at speculative narration, with the aim of re-mediating storytelling, introducing creativity in the scientific field as a key factor in promoting its dissemination.

The presence in the contemporary society of social media, the increasingly close intertwining of real and virtual, has cracked the individual's critical ability, the selectivity of seeking information, in many cases overturning the mechanisms of reading reality and trust towards the stories of everyday life. The strong imprint of marketing on storytelling has shifted the forms of narration from facts to post-truth. A model in which adherence to reality no longer matters as much as the impact, the involvement of the fan at any cost, and therefore the glitters and the package. In the shadows, having suffered this imbalance, lies all the fields in which adherence to reality is not only ethical but is necessary to avoid the collapse of a shared value system. Science, history, art, culture, in general, have remained in an unstable balance between strictly technical dissemination, and audience development, the need to transform users into fans, and consequently into customers, and then fall, except in rare cases. The monsters of the sleep of reason have been generated. The liberalization of social media opinions has given way to all sorts of claiming conspiracies, to any kind of self-referential story that avenges the discomfort of not fully understanding reality to the point of building a new, incorrect, aberrated but satisfying one. After all, storytelling is a biological function.

Hotel Baikonur deliberately creates a parallel between storytelling and speculative fiction, which share the ability -which is the ability of literature- to generate plausible but not real worlds and make them understandable. Science fiction can build events based on unreal or implausible -yet understandable- laws and scientific models. The artistic process of this work is based on the logical inversion in which sci-fi becomes the key to illustrating real news, discoveries, and scientific systems, making them (more) understandable through the narrative device, resetting the truth, the marvel, the importance of deep research in any field.

“Hotel Baikonur is an interplanetary broadcast in a precarious balance between science, science fiction, and speculative fiction. The things you will hear are true or imagined. There are real things on the edge of the incredible, and things imagined on the edge of reality. Many of the things you will hear will be a mixture of real and imaginary, past, present and future. And a lot of the things you will hear will be music.”