UIQ: A SPACE ODDITY Experience MACBA

What would the films of Félix Guattari have looked like? In this lecture/performance, part of a multiform project around Guattari’s unmade cinema, filmmakers and artists Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson explore the sci-fi screenplay Un amour d’'UIQ, tracing its relation to Guattari’'s earlier involvement in free radio and the Italian Autonomist movement.

UIQ (Univers Infra-quark) imagines a hyper-intelligent, infra-cellular life substance whose nascent personality manifests itself through interference with global communications networks and insinuation into the precarious desiring machines of a community of outsiders, ‘castaways of a new cosmic catastrophe’. However, when it falls in love with one of its human hosts, UIQ’s sudden discovery of the messy realm of human emotions and the principles of individuation will have fatal consequences both for itself and the planet.

Initially conceived by Guattari and Robert Kramer in the wake of an abandoned film project on the Italian social mouvement Autonomia, UIQ could be considered a ‘molecular’ response to a closure of the collective imaginary that began to take hold during the 1980s, mediated through rampant individualism, specious identity politics and the aesthetics of post-modern nostalgia. Guattari’s unrealised film has interesting implications both for cinema and collective practices in terms of how it promises to rewire dominant modes of spectatorship and subjectivation.

By revealing aspects of the UIQ script through its resonances with a number of sci-fi films of the period – from Solaris and Stalker, to Close Encounters and ET through Demon Seed, The State of Things, Blade Runner, Videodrome, Starman and others – as well as their own speculative investigations into its ‘production’ history, Maglioni & Thomson unveil the singularity of UIQ in the virtual dimension of what the film might have been and what it may yet become.

Related activities: UIQ in Love, a Love of UIQ
With the collaboration of BCNProducció