In the middle of London’s Hyde Park, a gateway to another world has landed. Artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Alienarium 5 has transformed the Serpentine Gallery into an interactive, multi-layered collage that revels in the possibility of encountering strange new worlds.

Conceived as a culmination of the artist’s lifelong interest in sci-fi and alien life, the work launches us out of orbit, observing our own planet from an otherworldly perspective. Ambient drones echo around the space as light sources glow like UFO headlights, holographic aliens surround the gallery and sculptures from unknown worlds have landed in the gardens. From the monumental 360-degree mural, Metapanorama, which sees alien landscapes populated by Earthly figures, to the pensive Alienarium, a VR experience where the user embodies an alien lifeform and asks how we relate to each other when untethered from our physical form, Gonzalez-Foerster seeks commonality in the unknown.

Cal Brockel: You’ve described this exhibition as an “anti-War of the Worlds vision.” What do you mean by that?
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: War of the Worlds as a novel is very much the prototype for a lot of encounters we’ve seen displayed, especially in movies, but there was also the radio play with Orson Welles. He used War of the Worlds to stage this story that’s all about survival, where the ‘other’ is the enemy. The word ‘encounter’ is not the right word, it’s a ‘war’. Because most speculative fiction is also rooted in the time it was written, War of the Worlds had some connection with its situation [at the time]. It has been damaging, but it has produced a kind of matrix for further narratives. There is a whole literature, a whole filmography, a whole continuation of the idea it can only be a violent encounter. If you connect it to the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in South America – that became a very violent and annihilating moment – you can understand why H.G. Wells would write this. This fear of the extraterrestrial has been constructed, and I wanted to deconstruct it.

CB: So War of the Worlds is a colonisation story from the point of view of the colonised, and you have a more hopeful interpretation of how that encounter could go?
DGF: Yes. In that sense it’s interesting because, I don’t know if you’ve seen the Paul Verhoeven film Starship Troopers? I think this film is very interesting in the way it was trying to explore empathy for the other, but at the same time working with these clichés of militarism. It gives us a possibility to examine the idea of empathy in relation to very different beings.

CB: I think the way Verhoeven used the sci-fi action format makes you, as an audience member, watch it on two levels. You can watch it as social commentary, or you can get swept up in that jingoism, as you would in a lot of films.
DGF: Totally. This is where he’s very smart because there is the film and then the meta-film that is observing.

CB: Did you grow up on sci-fi?
DGF: I really grew up with science fiction; my father was a big sci-fi reader. I think it’s also because growing up in the 70s meant being surrounded by this hippie environment where everything was about possibilities. Feminism was already strong, and ecology. There was a very liberating feeling and the sci-fi I was reading was very connected to that moment. Rather than being stuck in the past, it was examining possibilities – whether sexual, whether in terms of relationships or even rethinking family. Rethinking everything. When you think about the design or fashion of the 60s and then the 70s, there was this whole idea of, “What if things were like this?” And then exploring, being experimental instead of traditional. It’s the experimental side of science fiction and its speculative aspect. You’re so lucky in England to have had this amazing – and still for me a bit mysterious – history of speculative fiction. I know there is a genealogy, and probably Mary Shelley is a very important part of that. For me there’s Katharine Burdekin and the novel Proud Man, it’s about an extraterrestrial coming to Earth and experiencing humans in different ways. Katharine Burdekin is much, much less famous than Wells or [Aldous] Huxley, but she’s so incredible. I also grew up reading a lot of [J.G.] Ballard. It makes me wonder why England produced these writers. I know that some writers will generate other writers, and there is a whole context for that, but I find it very interesting that this island has a reservoir of production.

“This fear of the extraterrestrial has been constructed, and I wanted to deconstruct it.”

CB: Does that impact you when you’re putting something in a public space like you’re doing here, and like you did in 2008 [TH. 2058 at the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern]? How much does the community the space sits in effect what you do?
DGF: It’s very important. This is the context. In the 70s there used to be all sorts of ‘in- situ’ art. I would say this is ‘in-context’ art. The context is larger. This is also where it meets the collage because it’s possible to visualise this hypertext. Hypertext is collage.

CB: I’m interested in your choice of the panorama. Can you talk a little about that form and what your approach was?
DGF: In the late 1800s, just before cinema appears, there is this rich moment for panorama, [for example] the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 in the Crystal Palace. They were pre- cinema devices for experiencing other realities, other places, or to get a different experience of a place. It might sound funny, but I compare panorama to what VR is now, it makes it possible to experience other realities. For me, panorama is fascinating in terms of inventing an immersive space that is not the theatre window, but is audience-based. We still live in the 19th century exhibition idea. Art is very different but most of the time the way we walk through exhibitions, and the way we look at art is still totally informed by these forms. For me, every attempt to set a different relation between the work and the viewer is always interesting.

“…the opposite of War of the Worlds in the sense of trying to explore the other with much more subtle feelings.”

CB: It’s interesting you draw that connection between panorama and VR. In Alienarium 5, the experiencer’s own body is transformed in the virtual space into one of these aliens. Do you believe that virtual reality has the capacity to be an empathy machine?
DGF: I think this is VR at its best. There is also VR at its worst. At first, I had a kind of anti-VR feeling. When you think about what is fantasised about the metaverse and how anti-empathetic it is; how these worlds are made to disconnect you from all forms of life and give you illusion. This is why my first VR experience, Endodrome, was very much based on this trance moment. I like that you connect it to empathy. I like the idea that when you go into Alienarium you might even feel shy. Again, the opposite of War of the Worlds in the sense of trying to explore the other with much more subtle feelings. It’s very interesting when you read Jaron Lanier’s autobiography – he’s really the inventor of VR – he talks about the surprise when you disconnect yourself from your surroundings and enter this space. This moment does very strange things to your brain. The moment you enter is as important as the moment when you re-enter the surrounding world. He talks about wanting to have a flower or something to look at once you take the headset off, something to establish the same wonder for. I take the VR space very seriously. I call Alienarium a kind of brain massage and I think what it does to you is still mysterious. I know what I have been working on, and what I try to make you feel, but I’m not sure I understand everything. What’s happening in that space is fascinating.

CB: It almost sounds like describing meditation. It’s important how you enter it, and how you come out of it, and there’s something that’s hard to capture about what’s happening while you’re there.
DGF: Yes, because part of it could probably be explained in a neurological sense. How you disconnect from certain perceptions and make others stronger. But also, because you leave your surroundings, you need to be in an environment you can trust. This is why in Alienarium you lose part of your humanness; you’re cut from obvious perception as you enter. Also, you enter the artwork completely and become a full part of it – I find that very fascinating. It connects me to descriptions of artworks I’ve read in sci-fi books, this longing to become a part of the art somehow.

“There are so many different theories of Earth as a spaceship, Earth as a mother, Earth as a complex organism. We have all these planetariums where we look at other planets, this is reversing that lens.”

CB: Your work often has elements of synaesthesia. Is that another element of entering the artwork?
DGF: The more senses you work with, the more there’s a chance you hit some points that make you feel you’re part of something. In the Metapanorama, there are groups of humans, non-humans, spores and coral in this giant soup of beings. I think in order to feel that you’re not just a critical human on the outside, in order to feel you belong to an ensemble made of different kinds of lifeforms, you can engage all of the senses. We all think we feel, see and hear the same, but I know from experience it is very different. To reach that perception, it requires more synaesthetic aspects that connect this scent from an alien flower, these sounds, this planet carpet. I feel that all these elements somehow mimic a symbiotic moment. If you use only one sense, if you’re just into vision or listening, there is less chance this symbiotic aspect appears.

“…you enter the artwork completely and become a full part of it…”

CB: You previously mentioned the “chance of seeing Earth from a far away context” – what do you think we gain by exploring from that perspective?
DGF: It’s a transformative experience. In the Metapanorama, you enter and you’re standing on something that might not be Earth because Earth is floating above. The same way that there is a chance to access empathy by being inside, there is also a chance to access it from outside. It might be a paradox but it goes both ways. There are so many different theories of Earth as a spaceship, Earth as a mother, Earth as a complex organism. We have all these planetariums where we look at other planets, this is reversing that lens. I don’t know how it is in London, but here in Paris it’s so hot today.

CB: Yeah, it’s the same here.
DGF: I never felt a month of May like this. In Paris, we had 38 days in a row of high temperatures, and this is nothing compared to what is happening elsewhere in the world. There is a tension between the people and companies that want to launch space hotels or explore, in a very colonial way. People are being confronted with how exploitation has taken on gigantic proportions. This is perhaps a moment of reconnection: it seems now we’re eager to find this connection. I’m not specialised in shamanic forms, whether it’s mushroom-related or on a larger social scale, but there are all these books about being a tree, feeling like a tree, understanding a tree. I don’t know the point I’m trying to make because I got a bit lost. While I’m talking to you, I swear I’m in a forest. [laughs]

CB: It comes back to empathy, doesn’t it?
DGF: Yeah, there are people thinking that we need to go to other worlds, and why not if it’s done in a respectful way? I would say more than a respectful way, I would say in a shy way. A slow way. Step by step. There’s all this intraterrestrial life on this planet. There is also an understanding that we are a host for life. Especially now after two years of focusing so much on viruses and our own body, I have the feeling that lots of humans have a different relationship with their body and other bodies because of these two years.

CB: That’s interesting. After these two years of distancing, an exhibition that is about positive encounters seems very appropriate, and even needed. Everyone’s relationship to encountering other people has changed so much.
DGF: Totally. The project actually started before, but you’re right to say there’s a longing, a wish for an encounter. That became stronger.

CB: And of course a virus killed the aliens in War of the Worlds [both laugh].
DGF: Yes, it’s true. Did you see the version from the 50s? The way they show the virus is very clear, it’s also mini. I think the notion of scale is very interesting. In Fantastic Voyage [1966], the characters enter the body, it’s so incredible, it really plays with the scale. The same with The Incredible Shrinking Man [1957], at the very end you think he will disappear but he’s just in another dimension. Earth appears as a character in the Metapanorama, as another form of life among many others. We have all these little patterns developing – that’s an attempt to connect these different scales from the almost invisible, like a cell or a virus, to the very large.

Interview originally published in HERO Summer Zine 6.