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Athena Andreadis was born in Greece and lured to the US at age 18 by a full scholarship to Harvard, then MIT. She does basic research in molecular neurobiology, focusing on mechanisms of mental retardation and dementia. She is an avid reader in four languages across genres, the author of To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek and writes speculative fiction and non-fiction on a wide swath of topics. Her work can be found in Harvard Review, Belles Lettres, Strange Horizons, Crossed Genres, Stone Telling, Cabinet des Fées, Bull Spec, Science in My Fiction, SF Signal, The Apex Blog, World SF, SFF Portal, H+ Magazine, io9, The Huffington Post, and her own site, Starship Reckless.

In “Beyond Cinema” they looked at “How filmmakers and artists are shifting our ideas about what cinema can be, adding cinematic drama to reality, and reinventing the rules by reinterpreting creative processes”...

The dreams of merging with cinema in unfathomably richer ways are around the corner. I foresee a near future where luminous filmmakers don’t simply make movies; they create habitable, interactive worlds, with cascading layers of potential psychological catharses, gradients of bliss we cannot even begin to imagine.

And so we shall continue to dream, and architect our dreams, and remain open to visions that do not come to our ‘mature’ neighbors, with their wise, nodding resignations to nothingness.

In the 1944 Heider-Simmel demonstration, members of a study were shown an animation where shapes moved around the screen. What was discovered was that only three people out of 100 saw shapes moving around. The rest all saw love stories and attributed agency and intent to the shapes. They saw a story. Writer Jonathan Gottschall gives the audience of Why We Tell Stories to view the same Heider-Simmel demonstration. What do you see?