A lone, rugged dust-covered explorer, the geologist is a ready-made movie hero.

Consider the maverick volcanologists in Journey to the Center of the Earth and Dante’s Peak, portrayed by handsome leading men Brendan Fraser and Pierce Brosnan—these earth-based scientists are a romanticized lot, often portrayed in movies backpacking through forbidding terrain and fighting against the wilds of nature. After all, how many physicists, biologists, or neuroscientists do you see packing 9mm pistols and venturing into the far reaches of Kazakhstan in search of oil, or standing atop an active Hawaiian volcano amid flows of molten lava?

“It’s important to remember that a lot of geologists do stuff like that,” says Grainger David, a NYU graduate film student who recently won a $50,000 prize from the Tribeca Film Institute and the Sloan Foundation for his geology-infused screenplay Penny Stock. “They go into exploration geology, because they crave that kind of adventure in their everyday lives. And I think that’s inherently cinematic.”

David learned about the thrilling life of exploration geology while working as a journalist for Fortune Magazine. He wrote articles about privately financed space explorers and a world-renowned primatologist, but his most memorable story was covering a gold mining boom in Mongolia (“The Great Mongolian Gold Rush“). “It was a fascinating, inspiring adventure, and stuck with me for a long time,” he says.

While David allows that his script, which follows a geology professor who risks his livelihood to look for a diamond deposit in Canada’s Northwest Territories, is inspired by “Indiana Jones type tales,” he says, “at the same time, it was important for me to have that story also be realistic. And that can be inspiring and dramatic in its own way.”

John Van Hoesen, an Associate Professor of Geology at Vermont’s Green Mountain College, agrees that many geologists pursue their careers with a spirit of adventure. “There is obviously a spectrum,” he says. “But many people who end up in the profession are wanderers, and want to see the world and want to be outside, and perhaps aren’t as excited at the typical 9 to 5. And there is a freedom that comes with that.”

Van Hoesen, who himself has traveled from the Northern Yukon to Chile, where he studied the chemical composition of the paint on 7,000-year-old mummies, confirms there are plenty of “exploration geologists” who travel to faraway places and “live in tents for months,” “in search of whatever is that they’re in search of.”

While Michael Velbel, a professor of Geological Sciences at Michigan State University, spends lots of time in the lab, doing work that he calls “dull, slogging, boring stuff,” he admits that “there are eureka moments now and then”—which is what he believes popular culture captures well.

“I’m pleased to see movies where the geologists are following their curiosity and trying to come up with answers,” he says, citing Fraser’s character or Aaron Eckhart’s geophysicist in The Core.

For Velbel, one of the most resonant moments in science fiction cinema is when Sam Neill’s paleontologist in Jurassic Park first steps out of his jeep and sees the dinosaurs, and says, “They travel in herds.”

“For those of us who appreciate that the historical side of geology is about trying to figure out the way things worked in the past from very fragmentary evidence, and he gets a chance to see if he was right,” he says. “It’s deeply moving. That’s what we all hope for, and most of us will never get it.”

As for the representation of the actual science, the reviews are mixed. Some films get it right: Dante’s Peak’s volcano eruption isn’t half-bad, according to many, with an accurate visualization of the initial vertical explosion and the subsequent ash cloud (though the lava would never flow as fast as seen in the film) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is widely appreciated for its realistic depiction of early 20^th century petroleum geology and reservoir engineering, but there exists some debate about whether oil would feasibly appear in a silver mine. (The mine’s hydrothermal activity would probably drive off the oil’s hydrocarbons.) But for most others, as Velbel puts it, “In terms of factual accuracy of the way a movie portrays the physical science of nature, I’ve given up on that. My expectations are so low.”

Most geologists, for example, are quick to criticize The Core (2003), about a team of researchers who drill down to the Earth’s core to set it spinning again with a nuclear explosion, and Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008), based on Jules Verne’s classic 1864 novel. Not only is it technologically preposterous to burrow inside the earth’s deepest reaches—the world record was set last year when ExxonMobil drilled to a depth of about 7.67 miles, which is barely .2% of the earth’s radius—but there would be little wiggle room or hollow spaces to pass through, with the dense mantle experiencing pressures some 3.5 million times than that of the Earth’s surface.

Van Hoesen, who teaches a course on geology and film, finds it particularly frustrating that contemporary geological movies repeat the same mistakes as those made decades ago, in films like the original 1959 version of Journey or 1976′s At the Earth’s Core—with their cavernous spaces and magical hidden worlds existing miles below the Earth’s surface. “Twenty-five years ago, prior to our understanding of plate tectonics, I’ll let it slide,” he says. “But in a movie that comes out in the 2000s and doesn’t have a scientist on staff to better articulate the science, they’re just ignoring it.”

“Our understanding of the earth and the earth’s processes are so much better than 10 years or 30 years ago,” continues Van Hoesen, “but we continue to propagate the same myths and misconceptions.”

One common error, notes Mike Palin, a geology professor at New Zealand’s University of Otago, is to show that the interior of the earth is molten, when, with the exception of the outer core, most of it is as solid as, well, a rock. “As a geologist, I know it isn’t [molten],” he says. “But if we show a movie that doesn’t have a lot of hot magma inside the earth, it’s going to upset the common perceptions.”

In the more recent Journey to the Center of the Earth, Palin cites one egregious moment that made his “skin crawl.” To get out of the earth’s core, the team ignites magnesium in a rock. “But the problem is that magnetism is bound with oxygen and silicon in rocks,” he explains. “So it’s not like elemental magnesium, which is quite flammable. You could put an atom bomb next to magnesium in a rock and it’s not going to do anything. I guess at least they mentioned a real chemical.”

Palin, a geochemist who previously worked in mineral exploration, appreciates the real science at the heart of David’s Penny Stock project. “The basic idea is geologically valid,” says Palin. “There has been a ‘diamond rush’ in northern Canada since the early 90s. The mines can be incredibly rich—worth up to a billion dollars—but are extremely difficult to locate.”

According to David, a central “plot twist” in Penny Stock—spoiler alert—comes from the geological fact that diamond deposits were scraped out of the earth by large glaciers, and hence could be discovered far from their original source. In David’s script, the protagonist’s journey hinges on the discovery that the diamonds he and others are searching for have been pushed along not just by one, but a second glacier, moving in a completely different direction.

“I like it,” says Palin—and not simply because the script appears to accurately reflect mineral geology, but also in the way it presents the maverick spirit of his profession.

“Whether you work in the mineral industry or geologic research,” he explains, “there are always folks who are going counter to the [conventional wisdom], and it’s quite often the case it will take persistence and looking at something different—and they’ll actually be the ones to make the breakthrough.”

A robot helps an elderly man in the “near future” of upstate New York; a rural boatman in the lake region of conflict-ravaged Kashmir learns about environmental sustainability.

While Robot & Frank and Valley of Saints—two films supported by the Sloan Foundation that recently premiered at Sundance—couldn’t be more different in story and style, these disparate projects raise surprisingly similar concerns about traditional ways versus new technologies, the future of life on earth, and science’s role, and our own, in shaping that destiny.

In Robot & Frank, veteran actor Frank Langella stars as a retired jewel thief and second-story man who has grown increasingly cantankerous and forgetful in his old age. When his adult son buys him a caretaker robot, Frank initially resists his new-fangled computerized companion. After he realizes that the advanced machine can pick locks, a new friendship is forged. But what exactly does that futuristic relationship entail?

As director Jake Schreier put it in a recent phone interview: “What are the limits and advantages of that relationship? And what does the human relationship supply that the robot can’t?”

For research, Schreier and screenwriter Christopher Ford studied cutting-edge robotics, and the new wave of elder-care robots coming out of the U.S. and Japan, such as Honda’s Asimo and Toyota’s Partner robot and Boston Dynamics’ animal-based designs. Ford says the level of technology in the script was “far beyond” what engineers considered possible. Rather, the script was “influenced by the kinds of questions we’ll be asking about robot use,” he explains. “Is it more humanizing to be able to use technology to interact, or do we just end up only interacting with technology?”

It was also essential for Schreier and Ford that their robot be more realistic—neither the kindly No. 5 of Short Circuit nor the malevolent HAL 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and avoiding the cliché of the machine that miraculously takes on human traits.

“Instead of the robot magically ‘coming alive’ in the end,” says Ford, “crying a single tear that makes its head blow up, I wanted it to be important to the plot that the robot was just a robot. He was a tool that Frank used to steal.”

In this way, Robot & Frank becomes about how the fuddy-duddy Frank embraces technology, as a means to commit first-degree robbery and revitalize his deteriorating mind. But it’s also about how technology allows the character to come to grips with those realities and take responsibility for his actions.

Though set half a world away in contemporary Kashmir, Valley of Saints also focuses on an old-fashioned protagonist unexpectedly confronting the world of science, and finding it to be a catalyst for change. Gulzar is a traditional boatman who works on Kashmir’s famous Dal Lake. Together with his friend Afzal, he hopes to escape the area’s political tumult for a better life. But after he meets Asifa, a Western-trained female scientist who is studying the deterioration of the lake, he decides to stay and work toward preserving his community, both socially and ecologically.

“I wanted to explore this concept of resilience,” says writer-director Musa Syeed. “The science really helped me understand that change can be viewed not only as a disruption. But there’s also a way to dynamically adapt to change.”

While researching the area, Syeed learned that there have been many attempts to solve the environmental crises surrounding Dal Lake, which has been plagued by sewage, and silt polluting its waters. One of the solutions offered is to relocate people from the lake into other parts of the city. But Syeed was more interested in community-based methods and using new tools to “empower the locals to take care of their own ecosystem, and to realize their full responsibility,” he says.

In the film, for instance, Gulzar eventually builds a compost toilet—which requires little water and helps keep waste from contaminating the lake. It’s a small effort, but one that signals a major moment of transformation for the character.

A compost toilet may be a far cry from a robot, but both films ultimately show technological and scientific changes as constructive and self-empowering. As Syeed says, “I have a very hopeful perspective about how science can be used, especially in traditional communities.”

But for all the scientific background, both Robot & Frank and Valley of Saints are also shrewd in avoiding facts and figures or technological jargon in favor of more human stories.

Syeed spent a lot of time researching Dal Lake, spending a summer there living with the boatmen and talking to scientists, scholars and environmental activists. He also brought on renowned lake expert Steve Carpenter from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to consult on the screenplay. But as he got closer to production, and political violence in the region became more intense and the situation more volatile, he dropped that initial script, which included far more overt scientific references—the lead female was originally an English-speaking American scientist—and dwelled more on the characters and their urgent circumstances, such as Gulzar’s struggles with the military crackdown

“I think it helped the film,” says Syeed. “Science can be seen as this blunt object forced into a story. But it didn’t have to be and I wanted to find a way to talk about the bigger issues in a way that fit in with the film’s lyrical feel. That was part of the balance to strike. And I think we were able to do it in a way where it doesn’t feel like it’s advocacy or it’s a social issue film or self-righteous or preachy, but fits in an organic way.”

Similarly, despite the decade Ford spent researching robotics, he finally chose to be more speculative with his film’s sci-fi elements, instead focusing “more about the ideas and possibilities of technology than anything specific,” he says. “I never got too bogged down in detail.”

“It was really about taking one major conceit,” adds Schreier, referring to the robot in Frank’s life. “But it becomes more of a human drama. And any good science fiction film will do that.”

Indeed, both Robot & Frank and Valley of Saints may use scientific elements, but they are mainly about people and relationships, and what science can—or can’t—do for our selves and our communities.

As Schreier says, “In the end, we’re certainly more interested in the characters than making a statement about the future.”

The Sloan Student Liaisons will keep the word going about the Sloan Film Programs at their school; will be in touch with past or prospective grantees; and, most importantly, will make monthly posts about the progress of their screenplays and productions. They will provide the Sloan Science and Film readers with behind-the-scenes perspectives on the writing, researching, and production of their science-related films. Here is Dan O’Neil’s first entry: his impressions on the 2011 Sloan Summit!

Attending the Sloan Summit 2011 in New York City was in many ways the perfect follow-up to my graduate school experience as a screenwriter; at Carnegie Mellon, we few writers wander the corridors of the campus, vastly outnumbered by robotics majors, chemical engineers, mathematicians, and programmers galore. Our task there (as it pertains to creating a Sloan-eligible screenplay) is simple; grab any of those scientists rushing by us, wrestle them to the ground if necessary, and find out what they think would make a great movie. They are often surprised by this, but less often now since we’ve been holding a symposium to which six or seven of them are invited to speak on the particularly interesting or strange or simply dramatic scientific issues and themes they deal with on a daily basis.

From these seeds of an idea we proceed to write a script, redraft it, and workshop it. Our chosen scientist weighs in on both the first and final draft and finally it makes its way to the Sloan Foundation, after which a lucky few of us are bestowed with grant money. The question I had regarding receiving a grant such as this was: there are no scientists left to wrestle, and the rest of my colleagues are just like me, with a screenplay under arm but no camera, no production network. What are we to do next?

Enter the Sloan Film Summit of 2011! Gathering together all the winners of Sloan awards over the past three years, the Summit serves to bring the finest and brightest filmmakers together for three days and nights in either New York or L.A. (this year, New York), serve them lots of wine and appetizers (in this way it was similar to my Carnegie Mellon experience), and encourage them to encourage and inspire each other. Films are shown! Staged readings of screenplays are read! Out loud! In front of other people! For a screenwriter, the sensation is that of having fuel thrown over our small flame of a script. O.k., we say, yes! This is what can become of this thing I wrote, and here’s how other people are doing it. Many of the attendees are active filmmakers currently working on their own scripts and projects but we meet them with the hopes that we’ll all meet again, soon, on some movie set, collaborating, bringing our skill sets together, and thankful that Sloan brought us together first.

A brief synopsis of the three days must include a first-night pitch session that allowed anyone with a project in front of a microphone with about a minute or two to update the group as to where they were with their Sloan-funded project. Pitches ranged from, “I just need another three million dollars to go along with the seven we’ve already raised,” to “I don’t know what’s happening with my script but if it weren’t for the Sloan, I wouldn’t have written it at all.” Both responses were received equally, and while it manifests itself in different ways, I came to understand that the Sloan Foundation funds work to help change our mindset as to how we think of science in the first place; it’s a subject matter that’s hardly exotic (everything we touch, every story we tell contains some element of science, even if it’s as basic as day turning to night) and yet, severely underrepresented in our culture and in our stories. The Sloan Foundation simply encourages us, as storytellers, to include it.

The second day includes an industry lunch that brings impressive and influential producers, agents, and film companies together with the Sloan grantees; based on reading over the synopses, these industry people select whom they’d like to meet. In these meetings, they generally ask for a short pitch of the idea, and then request the full script. (I’m not sure what happens for filmmakers with active projects; I speak only as a screenwriter here.) I’ll report later on as to what happens after they’ve read these scripts, but hopefully, it moves them one step closer to production. At the least, it introduces them to us and us to them, which would not have happened otherwise.

Also on the second day, we watch a series of shorts, which all look incredible and all deal, in some way or another, with a scientific theme or character. It’s interesting to observe how difficult this task is, especially in short form. There is cultural tension between our archetype of the “scientist,” with his or (not very often) her crazy hair and crazy ideas, versus the honest depiction of one. We want them to have an epiphany or discover a cure, but often the most successful film treatment is to simply watch them work. They have a problem, and they try different ways of solving their problem. It’s storytelling at its most basic, which is comforting to me; the idea that screenwriters and scientists make use of the same basic methodology to solve our problems is a unifying one.

The third and final day of the Summit, it snows. We watch the huge snowflakes collect on the ground outside the amazing stretch of windows at the wonderful Museum of the Moving Image. We watch a feature-length film in a huge and impressive screening room called Whaling City that I hope makes it onto screens across the country one day. We wander the museum, replete with a short film by Jim Henson, vintage video games (they have one of the first versions of Pong!) and a whole floor devoted to an exhibition on the Muppets. Also of interest to the screenwriter are original drafts of movie scripts ranging back to the ’50s, with pencil scribbling in the margins. It’s already hard to imagine a time without computers. No wonder so many more people are trying to be writers these days; you just write it and it looks done (even though we know it’s not).

Later on, there’s a staged reading in front of our peers of seven of the screenplays that received Sloan Awards. The collected cast includes former stars of The Young and the Restless as well as a former Tony winner and member of the Broadway Hall of Fame. It’s inspiring to hear them breathe life into the screenplays just by reading them aloud in front of people, and I think, not for the first time, how beautifully simple our craft can be; just people in a room, reading a script, and yet, we all experience something at the same time.

Finally, a strong panel of collected scientists, producers, and writers discuss in depth and with great humor the benefits and pitfalls of writing scientifically engaged screenplays. Then we all get on a bus that takes us to a fancy cocktail lounge where we drink out the night. And then, already, it’s over. We go back to (in my case) our apartments or (in the out-of-towner’s case) the tiny pod-like cabins at Yotel, sleep, dream, and wake up inspired and ready to keep going, keep pushing, keep creating, keep thinking of stories that don’t ignore their science, to keep doing what we do, which is, in the end, the better gift from all this; we feel supported, and thus, we fight on.

Photographs by Marisa McGrody.

The Sloan Student Liaisons will keep the word going about the Sloan Film Programs at their school; will be in touch with past or prospective grantees; and, most importantly, will make monthly posts about the progress of their screenplays and productions. They will provide the Sloan Science and Film readers with behind-the-scenes perspectives on the writing, researching, and production of their science-related films. Here is Morgan von Ancken’s first entry: his impressions on the 2011 Sloan Summit!

I remember telling fellow Sloan grantee Joe Greco, as we tromped through the wind towards the first night of the summit, that I hoped they’d be serving food—I had only eaten breakfast that day, and fighting through what seemed like a localized hurricane was making me hungry.

Boy, was I going to the right summit.

When I finally arrived at the Yotel (a mix between the milk bar in A Clockwork Orange and the packaging of a Pokémon action figure) I was greeted with endless waves of delicious hors d’oeuvres and drinks, as well as a group of excited and slightly intoxicated writers and filmmakers. What followed was a pleasant hour or so, where we all earnestly conversed about our projects and where I covertly tried to stuff as much shrimp cocktail into my face as humanly possible. Next, we congregated in a back room where, after an eloquent introduction speech by Doron Weber, we all got up in front of the crowd and discussed our projects. This exercise, while fraught with a bit of high-school science-fair nervousness, turned out to be an immediate ice-breaker, and hearing everyone’s ideas was incredibly inspiring. Now all instant best friends, we continued to imbibe and talk; I left the Yotel about an hour later, in good spirits and completely full.

The next day began with a rousing talk by Ted Hope, which segued into another delicious lunch (a recurring theme, I realized). Then, after a few meetings—generously arranged by the Sloan Foundation—we adjourned to the nearby Director’s Guild Theater, where we ended the evening with a number of screenings and a panel. I found the short films we watched to be uniformly excellent—each one explored “science” in a distinct and imaginative way, from a mystery set across the period grime of 19th-century London to the terrifying tale of a suburban drone pilot. I also found the snippets of features we watched fascinating; as a feature-length screenwriter, it’s inspiring to see ambitious independent films actually in the can. Hearing from the filmmakers about what went on behind the camera piqued my interest even more.

On that note, the third day began with a screening of Jay Burke’s excellent film Whaling City, a dramatic narrative steeped in New Bedford’s fishing subculture. When we left the theater we were greeted by the first snowstorm of the season, a suitably surreal sight that is probably symptomatic of some sort of calamitous climate change (and which would probably make a good Sloan Script, now that I think about it). After paying homage to Gonzo and friends in a brief foray around the fascinating Museum of the Moving Image, we reconvened to hear excerpts from several feature-length screenplays. Again, these scripts displayed considerable imagination across a wide variety of genres, from Dan O’Neil’s wryly comic feature about a musician who is convinced he’s a black hole to the nuanced meltdown of the protagonist in Rob Cohen’s script Bystander. After that, things seemed to fly by rather quickly: They snapped a group photo (which, incidentally, I’d love to see, if anyone has it—I’m the tall bearded man lurking creepily in the background), convened another panel and, a few hours later, we found ourselves in the ritzy Above Allen, drinking, scarfing more hors d’oeuvres, and vowing to stay in touch via Facebook.

My final impression is that the Sloan Summit is a wonderful, vital gathering. The content of the panels and screenings was excellent, and the chance to meet like-minded filmmakers in such a welcoming, well-catered environment was incredible, really perhaps the best part of the weekend. In fact, I’m already looking forward to next year—I’ll be out of grad school by then, ostensibly a working writer… and I’ll need all the free food I can get.

Photographs by Marisa McGrody.

Machines are scary. Whether Decepticons, Terminators, or Master Control Programs, these heartless beings manifest our worst fears about technology. But while the metal-clashing visions of robots run amok in the Transformers movies look overblown, the actual research of scientists and theorists currently working in areas of artificial intelligence suggest a future inhabited by omnipotent machines is not entirely far-fetched.

In a new documentary called Transcendent Man (currently playing in single-night engagements around the country), Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the flatbed scanner and musical synthesizer, among other innovations, claims that in just 20 years computers will be able to match, and shortly thereafter, even supersede human intelligence.

Directed by first-time feature filmmaker Barry Ptolemy, a sci-fi fan who worked on E.T., the documentary examines Kurzweil’s prophetic ideas as well as his personal motivations—having to do with he and his father’s mortality—but the film largely raises more questions about the science than it answers.

Kurzweil’s chronology of the way life will evolve is, in fact, often disputed. “He’s completely off in the timing,” counters Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly in the documentary. But many computer and cognitive scientists don’t immediately write off Kurzweil’s fundamental belief in the Singularity—a future moment of wide-reaching technological change that will irrevocably transform human life.

Noted cognitive scientist Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, called Kurzweil’s theories “an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas” in a 2007 interview with American Scientist. While Hofstadter wants to dispel what he calls their “murky” science, he admits, “I don’t have any easy way to say what’s right or wrong.”

Kurzweil believes in the inevitability of major technological breakthroughs in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics that will pave the way for the Singularity. But contrary to dystopian sci-fi depictions, such as the Decepticons’ assaults on planet Earth, Kurzweil imagines artificial intelligence and cyber-enhanced humans working together to defeat disease and death. But some say Kurzweil’s unusually rosy attitude ignores the considerable obstacles still facing today’s AI scientists.

Kurzweil is a proponent of reverse-engineering the human brain. He suggests a “complete map of the human brain” will be possible within 30 years, through advances in neuron modeling and brain scanning. By mimicking the brain closely enough, he contends, we will be able to create a machine that is both conscious and intelligent, because we are conscious and intelligent.

While many scientists agree that the complexity of the human brain is fundamentally no different from a “machine complexity” that we could develop someday, other researchers have reservations about this neuroscience-based approach.

“Neuroscience is still unable to provide a clear and direct explanation as to how the microcircuitry of the brain actually functions,” says Hugo De Garis, a cognitive science professor and director of the Artificial Brain Lab at Xiamen University in China. “We know that the basic circuitry is the same all over the human cortex, but just how the circuitry works is still largely unknown.”

Or as Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, co-founder and research fellow of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, says, “Simulating the brain is the stupid way to do it. It’s like trying to build the first flying machine by exactly imitating a bird on a cellular level.”

A second approach, based in engineering rather than neuroscience, is called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which pieces together information from neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, theories of algorithms, and the philosophy of the mind to engineer an overall architecture for AI.

Ben Goertzel, co-editor of the book Artificial General Intelligence, and a 20-year veteran of AI research and development, says scanning the detailed functioning of the brain as a way of replicating how it operates may eventually work, but he believes an integrated AGI approach could happen sooner. “It’s just software code,” he says. “It’s just a matter of how to write the right code. That could prove a very thorny intellectual problem, which takes longer to build than brain scanners, or it could happen faster, in 10 years or less.”

Likewise, Benjamin Kuipers, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan who supervises an Intelligent Robotics research group, says it may be possible to create human-level intelligence by reproducing the brain’s processes at a higher level of organization than the neural pathways themselves. Kuipers cites simulators that have been created to reproduce the original 1946 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the world’s first computer, “that don’t try to replicate all those vacuum tubes, but emulate their logical functions—data structures and algorithms—using instructions implemented in modern VLSI chips,” he says, referring to today’s “very-large-scale integration” circuits.

But Kuipers doesn’t agree with Kurzweil or Goertzel about when human-level AI will become possible, if ever. “It seems safe to say that getting there will require some amount of scientific revolution, major or minor,” he says. “Therefore, there are at least some important questions we do not yet know how to ask.”

Prominent philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, co-director of Tufts’ Center for Cognitive Studies and author of Consciousness Explained, goes further. He believes the Singularity is theoretically possible but practically improbable. “It is also possible in principle for roboticists to design and build a robotic bird that weighs less than eight ounces, can catch insects on the fly and land on a twig,” he says. “I don’t expect either possibility to be realized, ever, and for the same reason in each case: It would be astronomically expensive of time, energy, and expertise, and there would be no good reason for doing it.”

One main sticking point for AI research is the idea of consciousness or emotion—vague concepts that aren’t easily quantifiable or scientifically proven but are essential for creating a supermachine because, many scientists claim, feelings are integral to handling our thoughts.

Many scientists agree that computational speeds will reach and perhaps even exceed that of the human brain’s built-in processor (10¹⁶ operations per second), but quantity doesn’t necessarily mean quality. As Stan Franklin, University of Memphis computer science professor and author of Artificial Minds, says, “I have no belief that mere numbers are going to become intelligent or conscious. Just looking at what goes on in the small fractions of a second in our cognitive cycles, it makes it hard to believe that somehow, out of nowhere, sentience is going to appear.”

In other words, there may be a Chevy Camaro in the future that can transform into a robot, but the chances that that machine can actually feel and express sadness or devotion or fear—e.g., Bumblebee, the Autobot, in the Transformers movies—are another matter, altogether.

“This computer analogy of the brain doesn’t capture the reality of being, related to emotions and feelings,” says Bijan Pesaran, an assistant professor of neural science at NYU. “And we don’t know how to implement those in a computer.”

While Pesaran notes that there have been advances in the development of machines that can engage our emotional selves and elicit sympathy, the machines themselves do not have feelings; they only feign emotional states.

And if the way we solve problems is inextricably linked to our emotional processes, Pesaran argues, “linking those two things together is definitely going to hold back our approach to the Singularity.” Thus, we could be in a situation with machines that are really smart, but “emotionally dumb,” he explains. “They’re going to be, in a sense, crazy machines, which is going to be a problem that we will be responsible for—even before they surpass us.”

It’s at this point that many scientists and researchers start to traffic in dystopian notions, contrary to Kurzweil’s hopeful outlook. Pesaran considers such machines a threat. His NYU colleague, Davi Geiger, an associate professor of neural science, agrees, in a sense. “It is totally plausible that computers will be better prepared to survive the world of tomorrow than we are, and so they may represent the new species,” he says.

The Singularity Institute’s Yudkowsky conceives of two options for humanity at that pivotal juncture. Either we build an AI to such high standards of precision with reasonably altruistic intentions that “we all live happily ever after”; or if the first AI is sloppily produced and is just smart enough to improve itself, “my guess,” he says, “is that rather than have an exciting final conflict between good and evil, in which the heroic outnumbered resistance fights an army of robots with glowing red eyes, we all just go squish.”

Yudkowsky, of course, is referring to the Terminator movies, or most sci-fi plots, from Battlestar Galactaca to Star Wars to I, Robot, which visualizes a grand battle between good humans and monstrous sentient machines—a scenario that most scientists agree is a load of hooey.

Perhaps more plausible, though far less cinematic, is a situation in which a super-intelligent AI will simply be uninterested in the human species—as a person might feel about an ant or a bacterium.

For a more intelligent rendering of AI than what appears in the special-effects-driven action-adventures of Hollywood, Ben Goertzel recommends Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, based on Polish writer Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel. “It really makes the point that intelligence doesn’t necessarily mean human intelligence,” he says. “We may have a massive intelligence which we don’t even know what it’s doing.”

Movies are built on conventions, presumptions, and clichés—they rely on us knowing certain things in certain ways; mutation is welcome, but rare. And yet, any lingering stereotype of the scientist as member of a cold, hermetically sealed species is all but exploded by Creation (opening January 22), director Jon Amiel’s new film about Charles Darwin and the all-too-human aspects of his life: his writer’s block, his mourning for his daughter, and his efforts to overcome his reticence about the bombshell he was dropping on the Victorian world.

“In some ways, he was a very conservative man,” said the film’s screenwriter, John Collee—who is not, it should be noted, a conservative man. A medical doctor who served in aid situations in Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and other far-off posts (“My daughter was born in the Solomon Islands; I met my wife in the Soviet Union”), he gradually gave up medicine for writing—first novels, then screenplays, most recently one about the author of On the Origin of Species.

“He did think that if we were to pull this thread the whole thing would unravel,” Collee said, about the Darwinian debunking of biblical “truth.” “They’d just come out of an age of revolution, economic and military cataclysm. And Darwin did sort of fear the consequences.” Besides, Collee said, there was Darwin’s relationship with his wife, a staunch believer. And his standing in the community. “And he was also deeply guilty over Annie.”

Anne Elizabeth Darwin’s death at age 10 devastated her parents, and that grief is at the heart of the Randal Keynes book Annie’s Box, from which Collee and Amiel (The Core, The Tudors) adapted Creation. Though the film doesn’t dwell on it, part of the guilt Collee referred to was based on Darwin’s fear that, because he and his wife, Emma Wedgewood, were first cousins, his children had inherited weaknesses. But it had been Darwin who took Annie to Malvern for her ill-fated hydrotherapy treatments (for what was probably tuberculosis), and the idea that the great scientist himself would be victimized by medical quackery is just one of the ironies of Collee’s screenplay.

“I wanted to make the point that science doesn’t know all the answers,” Collee said. “And there are plenty of scientists who, like it or not, are wedded to ideas that make no sense at all. Although, in a way, that’s how science advances.”

Creation is not a “campaign film,” Collee said. “Neither does it suggest that there’s no value at all to religion,” he added. “How I see Charles and Emma’s relationship is that they have this tragedy of the death of their daughter, and the evolution argument highlights it—the ways of dealing with the unknown, the inexplicable, the tragic in our lives. Either you retreat into the consolation of religion, as Emma did, or you retreat into the consolation of science, as Darwin did. And neither of these two things is right or wrong.” As portrayed in the film, Emma, played by Jennifer Connelly, “believed passionately that there was an afterlife, and that gave her sustenance. Darwin [played by Connelly's husband, Paul Bettany] believed passionately in the theories of evolution, and for him that gave meaning to his daughter’s death. What finally brings them together is the realization that these are both ways of reaching a language of the heart that trumps both these ways of thinking.”

Reached at his home in Australia, Collee said the argument there over evolution is less polarized than in the United States. “We don’t have the more extreme aspects of it, whereas in certain U.S. states they teach creationism in school. But there are certainly some people who don’t accept evolution.”

He said the modern-day equivalent of the evolution debate is the argument over climate change. “It’s no longer about trying to convince people of the logic of the idea,” he said, with a mild laugh. “You can talk yourself blue in the face about the scientific proofs about climate change—which I believe is true beyond a shadow of a doubt—but you will never get past the need of people to believe in something else. That’s what we’ve run up against in the whole climate-change campaign—that we’ve come up against the unspeakable and people’s minds aren’t ruled by logic. It’s the passions of the heart. It’s why James Hanson is tearing his hair out. ‘Why won’t they listen to the argument?’ And the truth is that scientific fact is only part of what governs our lives. Mysticism and the subconscious govern the rest of it.”

But the perfection of logic in Darwin—like the mathematics in Bach or the geometry of Da Vinci-speaks to something basic in human perception. And what Creation acknowledges, in its subtle fashion, is the aesthetic appeal of evolutionary theory.

“Absolutely,” Collee said. “I’ve always been fascinated by the notion of the golden mean, that there is scientific logic to aesthetics—that our response to natural beauty and beauty in art and music are all actually responses to an underlying, mathematical logic in all these things. I love that whole idea. And I think the [reason] that Darwin’s theory endured and was picked up by so many people is that there’s a perfection to it. It’s like E=MC². It’s so simple! Arrived at via a massively complex process of reasoning, but the central proof is so essentially simple and clear.”

And yet, resisted to this day—150 years after the publication of what it took Darwin 20 years to write.

“We tried to condense the 20 years of writer’s block on Darwin’s part and say, ‘What are the forces drawing him toward truth, and what were the forces blocking his acknowledgment of the truth?’” Collee said. “Part of it was his fear of dismantling the very big barge we’re sailing on—he’d studied theology, initially, at Cambridge, and he certainly believed that the structure of Christian religion was holding society together.”

Like Darwin, Collee studied medicine in Edinburgh; unlike Darwin, Collee got a medical degree and traveled, practicing in what he called “disease locations” in Asia, Africa, and the West Bank. His column on medicine in the Observer ran from 1991 to ’96, and his novels—Kingsley’s Touch, A Paper Mask, and The Rig—led him to screenwriting; Collee also wrote the screenplay to Paper Mask, which led him into Amiel’s orbit, and the two became friends. “The Creation screenplay actually started during a Ping-Pong game in Malibu,” Collee said. “We were just literally batting ideas back and forth about how to dramatize the story.”

And drama is something that has always spoken to Collee. “It’s a funny thing,” he said, “but the nature of medicine is that it’s a very kind of linear and didactic specialty and those of us who have a lateral-thinking part of our brains find that part of the brain not getting exercised. So you either go into research or write a novel. I took the latter option.”

Max Mayer doesn’t have any personal connections to Asperger’s Syndrome—or at least he wasn’t aware he did until he made Adam, his romantic drama about a man with the enigmatic condition. (The film, which won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, opened July 29.)

“In the late ’70s/early ’80s,” recalls the New York-based Mayer, “I worked in a camp with kids who were then called ‘emotionally disturbed,’ and the more I learned about Asperger’s, I realized that a number of kids that I had worked with would have been diagnosed with it, if that diagnosis would have been around then.”

It wasn’t until 1994 that Asperger’s—also simply known as Asperger and defined as an autistic spectrum disorder—was added to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and it’s only in the last few years that professionals and parents have come to recognize it. According to recent statistics, one in every 150 children in the United States will be diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder.

If brushing up on neurobiological disorders wasn’t enough of a research task for Mayer, he also gave his protagonist (played by Hugh Dancy) an obsession with astronomy, which required the writer-director to study the intricacies of telescopes and current space research, peppering the script with references to Big Bang theories and NASA’s recent Cassini mission to Saturn. Sloan Science and Film spoke with Mayer about his research methods, pornography, and how people with Asperger’s could be a higher form of human being.

How exactly did you go about researching Asperger’s Syndrome?

I did what everyone does and started with the Internet. And there’s a great deal of information that’s both objective and subjective. People with Asperger’s tend to be very comfortable with computers, so there are a lot of people putting themselves on video on the web, talking about their interests. It’s great information, but it’s inexact, because they’re interacting with a computer, not with people, which is my primary interest.

I also found two publishers: Jessica Kingsley Publications in Great Britain, and she puts out a full line of books on the autism spectrum; and in the U.S. there’s Future Horizons, which had a lot of first person accounts of relationships and people talking about the challenges that they face in their lives.

But the thing that really hooked me about Asperger’s is that it felt like a great metaphor for all relationships. People with Asperger’s have the same desire for connection as everyone else has without some of the skills and instincts. In “neurotypicals,” I see the same sense of desire for connection being paradoxically paired with not really being able to see the world through somebody else’s eyes.

Did you talk to people with Asperger’s?

After I wrote a first draft, I wanted some feedback from consultants, who worked with Asperger’s. We got involved with a group called Adaptations, which have socialization meetings, and talk in smaller and larger groups about their lives, challenges, and romances.

Did you end up changing anything after those meetings?

It was more about adding certain details. For instance, in one of the first conversations with the consultant Jonathan Kaufman, who worked at Adaptations, he told us that young men with Asperger’s often had specific collections of pornography. I didn’t want to hit this point too hard in the story. But there was an actual behavioral study, looking at social and sexual interaction and studying reciprocal behavior. And in the young men he worked with it was ubiquitous. It’s one of those hooks in the film that makes something specific. The pornography is like a classroom in behavior, like theater, movies or watching people in the street. People with Asperger’s get very interested in watching people interact and want to create rules from what they see.

You also included a little bit about how one of the traits of Asperger’s, as defined in the scientific community, is having a lack of imagination. But Adam argues against this notion. Why was it important for you to include that debate?

I actually corresponded with people in GRASP, which is an advocacy group for people with Asperger’s. And they strongly feel that there are some aspects to Asperger’s that is evolutionally developed, which was fascinating to me. Their sense is that if we are to survive as a species we are all going to need to be a little more Aspy.

Did you talk to any scientists?

Not when I was making the film. Honestly, it was important for me to get Asperger’s “right,” and to represent it well, but I was using it to tell a story that was focused primarily on relationships in general. So I was focused on the science to the extent that it would help me write the character.

The film also has a whole other dimension of science in Adam’s obsession with space. How did that become part of the film?

It became about astronomy and cosmology for a few different reasons: 1) because that really interests me, and 2) when I was doing research on Asperger’s, and you look at the list of special interests, astronomy is always high on the list. As far as the story goes, it has a visual component, too, and with its romance and mythology and fear and desire to know what is associated with space and the universe, it was stimulating.

Interestingly, you use the Big Bang as a metaphor for relationships, of people becoming close and drifting apart.

I liked the idea that at some point scientists came up with this Big Bang theory, which predicted that everything would continue to fly apart, slower and slower, until it stopped and reversed, but then they discovered that this is not at all what’s happening as far as we can see or tell, and that all of sudden, it’s flying apart faster. All of that stuff really triggered my imagination. The Fabric of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene, was really helpful. It read like a novel. While explaining certain things in layman’s terms, it also addressed it through poetry or metaphor, or the wonder of it all.

There’s a joke in the movie about Adam being different from Forrest Gump. Obviously, the film will be compared to other movies about people who have disabilities or neurological disorders, like Gump and Rain Man. In making Adam, were you thinking at all about how previous movies have represented such people?

I knew that I was dealing with a different disability and people tend to lump different disabilities together. And I wanted to make that distinction. That’s what Adam was making a joke about. Speaking through Adam, he wanted people to know that he wasn’t retarded. For Forrest Gump, it was about simplicity, and understanding things on a very pared down, simple non-intellectual level. There is no cognitive impairment in people with Asperger’s. In fact, some of them are quite brilliant.

There aren’t a lot of musical comedies that can get away with rhyming “chick” with “Watson & Crick”—or “T ‘n’ A” with “DNA.” You don’t see many films that explore the romantic obstacles presented by prosopagnosia (face-blindness). And it’s a rare thing to witness young filmmakers getting some of the best story ideas they’ll ever hear from a Cal-Tech neuroscientist.

Of course, there aren’t that many occasions in Hollywood where What You Know actually trumps Who You Know.

The Sloan Film Summit, which ran from November 5 to 8 in Los Angeles, may have been anomalous in its surroundings; it certainly added a fascinating dimension to the recently concluded AFI Fest 2008. Bringing together funders from various Alfred P. Sloan Foundation programs, the American Film Institute Conservatory introduced grant winners to scientists, scientists to film professionals, film professionals to budding filmmakers and playwrights, in a kind of melding effort that mirrored the Sloan mission itself—the integration of an accurate and engaging portrayal of science in the popular arts.

“They can’t see it as ‘Here’s science’ and ‘Here’s fiction,’” said David Kirby, an evolutionary geneticist who lectures in science and communication at the University of Manchester. He was enlisted to moderate several Sloan Summit programs, involving present and would-be grantees. “It has to be about telling a story.”

Toward that end, Sloan award-winners presented work in several genres. Before the Moment, for instance, the musical referenced above, is by Jihan Crowther and Matt Schatz, and concerns DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin. While it takes a light-hearted approach, and the libretto and lyrics are full of smart, punny lines, it also concerns Franklin’s quite serious dilemma of having to choose between a life of joy, and a life of achievement. And whether she ought to masquerade as a man in order to circumvent the sexism of her profession.

Before the Moment, commissioned by the Ensemble Studio Theater/Sloan project, was just one of many works throughout the Sloan Summit in which ethics were of major concern. During the staged screenplay readings held at the Stella Adler Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, Sarah N_12, from NYU’s Sasie Sealy and Mark Heyman, explored crime via the virtual world’s Second Life. In Jay Burke‘s Whaling City, a commercial fisherman working depleted waters considers a sideline in smuggling, and Madeleine Holly-Rosing‘s Stargazer told the unlikely story of real-life Scottish immigrant Mina Fleming and her development into a world-class astronomer. As always throughout the Sloan Summit, the occasional need for poetic license was acknowledged, but so were the responsibilities of the dramatist who employs technology, biology, or psychology for the purposes of storytelling.

“My concerns are twofold: accuracy and quality,” said Dr. Paul Ekman, former professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, whose work is the inspiration for the Fox series, Lie to Me. Ekman’s forum was a panel discussion titled “From Geek to Chic: The Growing Popularity of Science in Prime-Time Television.”

“You don’t want to be misleading, dispensing information that would, for instance, sway juries,” Ekman said. “Or policemen. A lot of policemen get their version of science from TV.”

What the panelists weren’t opposed to was elevating the perception of the scientist in the minds of mass-media consumers, although as pointed out by Dr. Nicholas Warner, professor of physics, mathematics, and astronomy at USC, a big-screen presence doesn’t always enhance the romantic image of the brainiac.

“Not many people came out of A Beautiful Mind, saying ‘I want to be John Nash,’” Warner said.

But there’s an inherent attraction to the fictional scientist, said Nick Falacci, co-executive producer with wife Cheryl Heuton of the CBS series NUMB3RS—including the stereotypical “arrogant scientist.”

“He has powers,” Falacci said. “The powers of observation. The power of being right. He cuts through the clutter and provides observations no one else could make in those settings.”

“But being a scientist is a way of being; you can’t just graft him onto a script,” Warner cautioned. “Don’t eviscerate your scientists by forcing them to do things they wouldn’t do.”

How to avoid that pitfall was the subject not just of “From Geek to Chic” but of a sister panel, “We Told You So: Scientific Disasters in Film as Entertainment or Cautionary Tale,” which was moderated by Kirby, author of the upcoming Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science’s Impact on Cinema, Cinema’s Impact on Science. The panel included Flash of Genius director Mark Abraham, whose film, starring Greg Kinnear, concerns the struggles of Robert Kearns, inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. Kearns battled Detroit for years to be recognized for his stolen invention. But while Kearns’ scientific gifts and the invention itself played a part in the story, character and narrative were of far greater importance to Abraham.

“We honored him as an engineer and for his ideas, but he did grapple with moral issues,” Abraham said, the point being that dramatic propulsion is the objective—but that getting the science right only helps that cause. “You want to give the actor the confidence to believe.”

Abraham has produced any number of films in which technology was either central or tangential—including Air Force One, Dawn of the Dead, End of Days, and most recently Children of Men, about a world in which humans have ceased to reproduce. Based on the P.D. James novel, it was adapted by Abraham’s Sloan Summit co-panelist, Timothy J. Sexton, offered some insights about converting science into entertainment.

Such narratives “are hardly ever about the technology. Or they’re about how the technology cannot save us,” Sexton said. “But every technological advance that solves a problem creates a new problem. So [for storytelling] there are great possibilities.”

Some of those possibilities were laid out by Moran Surf, a neuroscientist currently conducting research at the California Institute of Technology into the definition of consciousness. He more or less told the filmmakers in the audience to listen up before giving them a list of the 10 best new, unexplored, and recently researched areas that could provide the basis for a movie plot.

And he added that he hoped to see some of them on screen soon.

They included the science of consciousness; the chemical basis for love and happiness; advances on a unified field theory (“the theory of everything”); ethics and animal research; and what Surf explained were “one-off” or singular cases of neurological disorder: a patient he knew of, for instance, who couldn’t experience fear.

“I can’t publish a paper about them,” Surf said. “They’re singular cases; they don’t represent anything larger. But their stories should be made into movies.”

Not that those science movies always do so well—as the panelists pointed out, even 2001: A Space Odyssey found no safe harbor at the box office, not initially; Children of Men fared little better; likewise, Flash of Genius.

But this seems unlikely to stop filmmakers like NYU grad Dara Bratt, whose short film In Vivid Detail seemed the perfect synthesis of Sloan ideals: an engaging story hinging on—but neither subordinate to, nor eclipsed by—scientific information.

In it, Leslie (Piper Perabo), a new employee at an architecture firm sparks romantically with Justin (John Ventigmilia), who suffers from prosopagnosia—an inability to recognize or process faces. The result of frontal-lobe damage, Justin’s disorder doesn’t just affect his social skills, it rocks Leslie’s world a little bit too: if Justin doesn’t respond to her face, how is she going to be interpreted by him? What’s her identity? And, as Bratt put it, “How is beauty measured?”

Bratt said she got the idea from a friend who was studying prosopagnosia at Harvard, and she credited NYU with stressing the amalgamation of science and narrative, the idea that the neurological disorder “weave through the story and not be made into some expository paragraph. And I felt a responsibility to portray it accurately.”

She said she “wasn’t a science kid,” but has suffered from insomnia and has long been intrigued by questions like “How do we fall asleep?” She was also inspired by portrait artists who work the streets of her hometown, Montreal, which gave her the idea, incorporated into her film, about breaking a face down onto a grid—on architect’s paper, for example—thus making the mysterious whole understandable in parts, to someone like Justin.

Bratt applied for a Sloan grant through the NYU/Sloan partnership (she said she’ll seek funding for her feature through the Tribeca, Sundance, and Hamptons). She found out she’d won while working a seemingly unlikely job: assistant director on Cheaper by the Dozen 2, while it was shooting in Toronto.

“Piper Perabo appeared in the film,” Bratt said, “and I wouldn’t have dared approach her. It was a professional relationship. But a friend who had the script gave it to her.”

After some nerve-wracking weeks, Perabo agreed to do the film, which was shot largely in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn. Ventigmilia came aboard thanks to Perabo.

And the Sloan Summit? “I loved it,” Bratt said, of an event that brought newcomers like herself together with grizzled veterans of the film world, some of whom have been Sloan awardees. “Werner Herzog saw my film!”

For other reports on the Sloan Film Summit 2008, read Eli Akira Kaufman‘s post on the Film Independent blog and Roxanne Benjamin’s post on the AFI Fest blog.

Although it’s set in a future where people connect to the Internet through nodes implanted in their flesh, the world of Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer is remarkably similar to the present. The border between the U.S. and Mexico is sealed, but Mexican workers can cross over virtually with the help of a “coyotek,” a back-alley surgeon who implants the costly nodes at cut-rate prices. Privatized water, already a reality in parts of Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, has made its way to southern Mexico, where struggling campesinos pay top-dollar to irrigate their tiny patches of land.

Inspired as much by Bicycle Thieves as Blade Runner, director Alex Rivera and co-writer David Riker set out to create a plausible vision of the future while keeping a safe distance from contemporary political debates. But as they worked on the script over a period of several years, they found that reality kept catching up to them. “We would joke that we set out to write a science-fiction film, but by the time we were done, it was a period piece,” Riker says.

Sleep Dealer, which took Sundance’s screenwriting award and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for science-oriented films, follows Memo (Luis Fernando Peña), a bulky country boy, from his family’s rural village to the big city of Tijuana, where he finds work in one of the human factories that have replaced the industrial economy. In these “sleep dealers,” so called (in English) for the exhaustion they mete out, node workers connect their nervous systems to robotic machinery on the other side of the border, exporting their labor without moving their bodies.

A guileless stranger in a strange and unforgiving land, Memo is taken in by Luz (Leonor Varela), a struggling writer who makes ends meet by selling her memories on the web. Business has been slow, but she acquires a loyal customer in Rudy (Jacob Vargas), an American drone pilot who stages long-distance air raids from a San Diego skyscraper. Rudy is used to following orders and not questioning his targets, but when he discovers that the “terrorist” he incinerated was Memo’s father, the consequences of waging virtual war begin to weigh on him. The technology that has isolated the movie’s characters begins to bring them together, erasing the boundaries it once enhanced.

Rivera began working with the ideas behind Sleep Dealer in the mid-1990s, inspired by the confluence of economic liberalism and cultural xenophobia. He points out that 1994, the year that NAFTA dissolved the trade barriers between the U.S. and Mexico, was the same year that the U.S. began Operation Guardian, whose anti-immigration measures included the beginnings of the border wall. “If we live in a world where businesses can travel freely across borders and build factories wherever they want, but then walls are put up so the workers can’t move, the picture isn’t pretty,” Rivera says. “It’s like there’s one type of freedom that’s being celebrated, and another that’s being taken away.”

From the beginning, Rivera has been fascinated by border crossings. Papapapa, produced when he was a political-science major at free-form Hampshire College, retraces his father’s immigration from Peru, and his 2003 documentary The Sixth Section explores the bonds between a group of immigrants in Newburgh, New York, and their hometown of Boquerón, Mexico, two communities that function as one despite the thousands of miles between them.

Raised by his Peruvian father and his mother, a native of New Jersey, in upstate New York, Rivera says his childhood inspired his lifelong interest in cultural overlap. “On one floor, my mom would be watching Days of Our Lives, and on another floor, my dad would be watching Dos Mujeres, un Camino on Telemundo, so my house was cross-border just from one room to the next,” he recalls. “It’s sort of an absurd place to grow up.”

Rivera’s culture-clash upbringing expresses itself in the hybrid texture of his films. Sleep Dealer‘s futuristic tableaux are bathed in incandescent pinks and greens, and Rudy’s bombing missions are realized with a heavy dose of computer animation. But the scenes where Memo and his father tend to their patch of beans and corn could come straight out of Salt of the Earth.

“A lot of people that are interested in political films or making films on social issues are very committed to a documentary form,” Rivera says. “Through all my work, I’ve been trying to play with the form, mix in animation, mix in a sense of humor, mix in an element of surreality, in order to talk about this, at times, very violent, very intense, very absurd reality that we live in.” (Rivera’s fondness for mashups is also expressed in a weakness for puns: virtual workers are “cybraceros,” while a sign in a dive bar offers access to “Live Node Girls.”)

The mixture of science fiction and social realism has a political component as well. “We felt that most science-fiction films have ignored the question of unequal social development,” Riker says. “They presuppose, whether you’re watching Minority Report or Blade Runner, that the new gadgets and flying vehicles exist all over the planet. But we see that history is not that way, that quote-unquote modernity has never been distributed equally.” In Sleep Dealer, “the idea is that one part of the world is living in science fiction, and the other part is living the way it has for hundreds of years.”

Riker’s 1998 film La Ciudad was a neorealist chronicle of the lives of Spanish-language migrant workers in New York City, but he has been living in Oaxaca, Mexico, for the last three and a half years, where he has experienced the onset of Sleep Dealer‘s water crisis firsthand. Like many components of the movie’s speculative future, the corporate control of southern Mexico’s water supply is only a slight interpolation from the world of today. The “aqua-terrorists” accused of sabotaging the water conglomerates’ operations were inspired by the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia, who successfully protested Bechtel’s control of their municipal water supply. The virtual labor of the sleep dealers is merely a physical analogue to the Indian workers who staff call centers and read X-rays in Bangalore and Hyberabad. Neural interfaces of the kind Sleep Dealer envisions are still a ways off, but scientists have succeeded in connecting computers to the brains of paralyzed patients, allowing them to control the device with their minds.

“People who knew about the script would email us articles as the script started to come true,” Rivera says. “A lot of the predictions that the movie puts forward, 10 years ago they were political satire. It’s been fascinating watching the world catch up with my absurd nightmare scenario.”

Mixing present and future, realism and speculation, Sleep Dealer embodies what Chicano artists call rasquachismo, a kitchen-sink aesthetic in which objects are thrown together without regard for their intended use. “I, and millions of other people like me, live in a kind of hybrid cultural space,” Rivera says, “a little tiny slice of America that has no border, that speaks both languages, that looks at the world from a point of view that’s from the South and from the North. Sleep Dealer tries to do that.”

When Steve Kurtz, an associate professor at SUNY Buffalo, discovered that his wife and collaborator, Hope, had died of heart failure in her sleep, he called the paramedics, who discovered bacteria cultures in his house and called the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Kurtz, the subject of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s new film Strange Culture, had been using the benign cultures as part of an art exhibit that would raise issues about the biotech industry. After the bacteria was legally declared to carry no health risks, Kurtz was arrested for defrauding the bacteria’s online retailers. In the wake of his wife’s death, he suddenly found himself being questioned about having Arabic literature around the house and being a potential sexual deviant. He’s currently awaiting trial for fraud.

Strange Culture combines documentary, staged fiction, and footage that falls somewhere in between—actors stepping out of their roles to give their own opinions, real people playing themselves—to offer a collision of opinions, stories, and speculations in which no single perspective is privileged. The result is a mood of paranoia: as Kurtz is hounded for crimes that aren’t crimes that he didn’t commit, the film questions even its own fabrications.

Hershman Leeson, a Sloan award winner for Teknolust, once again uses a scientific angle as a way to look at the larger sociological implications of an issue as well as a more intimate human-interest story. While the science initially seems to only be part of the premise, the cultures are eventually shown to be crucial to the film’s central argument: it’s not men like Steve Kurtz but the government that is cavalier about human life. Late in the film, the actor Peter Coyote reads a testament from retailer Dr. Robert Ferrell, his character’s real-life counterpart: “All the citizens of the United States have been turned into unwitting experimental victims of the mass-marketing industrial phenomenon which has no regard whatsoever for their health.” Sloan Science and Film interviewed Hershman Leeson via email about the case, the science, and her own techniques.

When did you first hear about Steve Kurtz? Just after it happened, most of the people in the art world knew—it was kind of underground information.

Human rights violations and personal tragedy are at the heart of the story, but of your three features, this is the third to prominently involve science, particularly biology and DNA. Is there something about the science here that relates to the science of your other movies? Perhaps a bit, but what was most interesting was the fact that Steve and Robert [Ferrell] were giving information that apparently people did not want known. My other films were more about discoveries and credit.

Was there something familiar about the scientific aspects of the case that gave you a grasp over this larger story of political abuse? It was more an issue of freedom of expression, consequences of repression, and censorship. The scientific aspects were secondary, yet important because it applies to the scientific community as well.

There’s a fascinating scene toward the end of the film in which a doctor begins railing against the genetic modifications of the food industry… That was Peter Coyote, who researched this extensively.

Ostensibly this scene is related only tangentially to the main story, but did you mean something deeper by it, by providing a parallel example of another large institution’s abuses of those whom one character calls “unwitting experimental victims”? I think it is precisely the heart of the story because that is what Steve and Robert [Ferrell] were saying in the work that was exhibited.

Were the scenes in which the characters and people talk as themselves scripted? No, we shot quickly—Peter Coyote [for] 40 minutes, Tilda [Swinton for] 40 minutes total, and kept the cameras rolling. They were so smart and interesting [that] it was more vital and lively to keep the improvised conversation in the film, and they agreed to it. Steve helped me write the scenes with Hope.

Were the re-stagings and the interviews with the actors meant to provide some speculation that Kurtz couldn’t provide himself, or were they meant to go in the opposite direction, and try to reveal the solid truth of the matter? Both; the challenge was that since Kurtz could not talk about the events of the day, yet we needed to have them known to the audience, the only way to do it was through a second Steve Kurtz and reinterpretations. But then that touches on how media creates identities we have to live with whether they are true or fabricated. They become manipulated truth.

Kurtz himself compares the film to the prosecution of the case, as though everything on both sides is completely fabricated, and it seemed like that was something you were trying to get past. Yes, and I was also trying to mirror the work of the Critical Art Ensemble itself.

There’s a scene I was trying to make sense of early on in which a teacher (Josh Kornbluth) refers to noirs as depicting a time in which everything was clear-cut in black-and-white. Was there something in particular meant by the scene? It seemed to me like the facts of the case were in black and white, but were you trying to draw attention to the compromises and equivocations of the students caught in between? Yes, but I had to cut a lot out. The attorneys were very careful so some things may not make sense. There was a scene of shadows where a student left the room that got cut, but in general it was comparing the McCarthy hearings to present day repression.

Were the sequences involving the students scripted, or were those based on actual hesitations of Kurtz’s students? This was absolutely true, but it happened to me, not Steve. Steve’s students were very much behind him. This was at the University of California, Davis, where students were afraid of the consequences.

Did you do any scientific research? Always. My Undergraduate research was in biology, my mother was a biologist, my father a pharmacist, my daughter and brother medical doctors. Science to me is like art, it is about discovery. I also discovered through science, I guess, things like touch screen, the first interactive laserdisc, Lorna [a choose-your-own ending movie Hershman Leeson made from 1979-1983], virtual sets, artificial intelligence bots. I love mixing it up.

Was Kurtz’s art exhibit, or any variation, ever allowed to be shown? No.

Has the scientific retailer been forced to stop selling cultures? No, but Dr. [Robert] Ferrell had to retire because he had a stroke after all the pressure. No one thought they were defrauded.

Has the film had any effect on the Kurtz case? I think it is making people aware of it. That’s why I wanted to do it now, prior to the trial.

What’s been Kurtz’s reaction to the movie? He likes the movie, but cannot sit through it because it brings up too many memories.

David Pratt-Robson blogs at videoarcadia.blogspot.com and is a contributor to Slant and jacques-rivette.com.