Project

FICTA SciO, in Latin, means “I know fictitious things”, but it also stands for “Figuring the Invisible: Conventions and Tactics in Animation for Science Outreach”.

It is a two-year research action proposal (2023-2025), funded by the European Union with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship: the Research Fellow is Marco Bellano.

FICTA SciO addresses a major problem in contemporary science outreach: the animated visualisations of the “invisible” sides of reality, like black holes or atoms, or even extinct animals, are mostly offered to the audience “as they are”, without any warning that they are scientific models based on non-optical evidence. Because of this, they get misunderstood for true-to-nature representations, and as such they circulate also in audio-visual entertainment, reinforcing the wrong belief that those object would exactly look like that, if they were to be seen by the human eye.

This website provides to a general audience a critical repertoire of such animations from 1980 to the present day, to promote a better understanding of the audio-visual conventions and communication tactics pertinent to animations in multimedia science outreach.