Poetry Performance

“Father of Sci-Fi”

Video Film Titles:

• Title: Father of Sci-Fi
• Artist: Matt The Unfathomable Artist
• Year: 2025
• Medium: Video with narrative audio and dramatic music; poem performed by the artist
• Duration: 1m50s
• Format: MP4, 16:9, stereo; exhibition master on solid-state media
• Credit line: Courtesy the Estate of Matt The Unfathomable Artist Ltd
• Rights: ©2021/2025 Matt The Unfathomable Artist
• Licenses:
  • Artist produced and directed AI generation with Adobe Firefly.
  • Music licensed from Pixabay.
• Provenance: From the artist’s Estate

Curatorial:

Father of Sci-Fi operates in the tradition of poetic film documentary.

Envisaging overheated mechanical instruments as a warning against unchecked manmade systems that built them; the film’s central imagery—gauges and thermometers—provide a fine argument for climate discussion in denial.

By placing H. G. Wells as the background inspiration, I’m drawing upon a vivid history of industrial biography to implore systemic commercial change.

Science-fiction is treated as a logic to prime societies into accepting large-scale industrial change. Avoiding the often reported dystopia of future civilisations. That same logic can be used to prepare humane futures rather than excuse extractive ones.

The film’s ecological thesis is a beautiful blunt instrument in itself.

War and resource harms are not only a human tragedy; they are an accelerant of ecocide. Ruining soil, water and air in the moment, locking regions into disaster zones through spiritual or monetary corruption. The poem names this as anti-cyclic use of Earth’s resources: a refusal to close loops, to repair flows, to respect sustainable limits.

Formally, the piece is a crafted sense of emotive visuals. Battlefield grounds read like scorched plates and ravaged lands. Ancient Egyptian symbology suggests melted ore and coinage, tying metallurgy to monetary currency and to the direct pricing of economic damages.

The narrative language is highly tactile—heat, force, mass—ethics coupled to matter.

For museums, Father of Sci-Fi invites cross-departmental interpretation. Residing comfortably beside media art, environmental issues and design. Art speaking to public-facing programmes on climate literacy, post-conflict recovery and wise economical transition. The work’s request is modest and exacting: learn to read the warning gauges we already have, shift policy, industry and culture to fully enable political administration to appreciate avoidable risks.

“An instrument panel for conscience—counting the costs of economic ecocide”.

---

“Father of Sci-Fi”

Father of Sci-Fi

the Heat Hearth Ray is here

temperature gauges molten high

and we keepeth saying

thou hast Locusts for Eyes,

Digging deep, molechian

releasing gaseous meths insane

cursive wooden canes

corruption rife

Father of Woe and Strife,

Old Man of Borneo cries

because his homely home fries

the skipping Unicorn of the North died

took its place with the dodo

and white blackened lies,

The predator never softens

its invisible man-like face

with fossil fuelled Gatling paint

charmed mummied balms

beware of baying similed bait,

Watching morphological clay

take on iron bayonetted Centurion

Dalekian-like turreted firepowered display,

Degenerated eliminated biological decay

Gray calls out to fish bellied Lover of They

‘Listen, I have seen these terra-aliens

with row upon row of destructed guillotined

bloody finned melee!’,

Did Man only crawl out since 18th Century

mangle-mired oily burned dimly lit

Anti-Cyclic way?”

– poem by Matt The Unfathomable Artist, copyright © 11th July 2021.