Worlds Beyond was my Masters degree major project. As such, I wanted to have something larger to show and to push my skills and knowledge through the project. A lot of my previous projects and other works were along the lines of static posters and images but video I had less experience with, Adobe After Effects particularly, which ended up being a key part of the project.
Science fiction, chiefly soft science fiction, interests me as a proposal of “what if?” What if we could travel vast distances via faster-than-light technology or portals of some kind? What if humans could teleport? What medicines and cures could be discover/invent in the future? Since science-fiction is generally set in the future relative to the time of writing it, ideas proposed could theoretically become reality to varying degrees of likelihood. Consider how rapidly technology is progressing, with the average smartphone being roughly comparable to a computer that once occupied an entire room with units like hard drives being the size of washing machines. Then factor in robotics, AI language models, video games and entertainment, and so on. Science fiction pushes the envelope, what could happen next. It’s almost a challenge to humanity to make theories reality, whereas science fiction writers (novels and films/television) are unbound by known physics and science thus capable of exploring possibilities through imagination alone.
Additionally, as expressed in my video project, space travel opens up possibilities of different planets and galaxies, dimensional travel as depicted in Worlds Beyond allows the freedom to explore locations that don’t even conform to physics that we know of such as liquid universes. It is an expression of wonder driven by imagination.