Fund for the Arts, New New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts and Education Endowment Fund, and the Nelita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation, New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts, and viewers like you.

These discussions of, you know, honoring people's humanity, and even data's humanity, is desperately important.

From Star Trek, the Next Generation TV series, to the Carolinian books, sci-fi writer Melinda Snodgrass candidly shares her industry adventures and writing inspirations.

In the thought-provoking "Sea Change" exhibition at the Perez Art Museum, artworks flow between watery warnings, poetic reflections on human nature, and futuristic reinterpretations of technologies reshaping our lives.

It's all ahead on "COLORES."

But the ideas are still the same.

New worlds, old truths.

So Melinda, thank you for being here on Colores today to talk about your writing and your time on Star Trek in the Writing Carolingian series.

So what drew you into the world of science fiction?

I think it was my father.

My dad was a voracious reader.

He read a book a night because he had terrible insomnia.

And he would read to me Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

But he left out all the fish stuff.

He just read me all the cool adventure stuff and like this fancy submarine.

And so I think that started my love there.

The first book I read on my own as a kid was A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

And I think I was seven years old or something.

And that was it.

I was hooked.

You started off in law.

So what led you from the courtroom to the writer's room?

- I love the study of law.

I did not like being a lawyer.

I honestly, I found conversations with other lawyers to be relatively dull.

People were talking about their billable hours and writing contracts and it just, and my best friend at the time was a novelist, a science fiction novelist.

And he took me to a party after an autographing at a famous writer named Fred Saberhagen's house.

And they were the most interesting people I had ever met in my life.

I mean, like there was Susie Charnas was talking about the effect of language on culture.

And Fred, who had written a book about vampires, was reading this letter from this lunatic in Romania who had written him this long letter about how he thought he was Dracula.

And it was just, it was an amazing group of people.

And I left that party with my friend, Vic, and I grabbed him and I said, "I have to be part of this world."

And Vic said to me, "You're a creative person.

"I think you could probably write if you tried."

- And then you ended up writing for Star Trek The Next Generation.

How did that happen?

- That happened because of George R.R.

Martin.

He called me one day and he said, "Hey, I think you'd be pretty good at the screenwriting thing.

and if you'll write a spec script, I'll show it to my agent."

So I was trying to think, what do I write for?

I looked at LA Law, 'cause I was an attorney, and it looked like it was too carefully plotted for me to sort of slide in.

So I decided to write a Star Trek script.

So I wrote a script called "The Measure of a Man," which drew on my legal education, and then I sold my script and got hired off that script, and George complains about it constantly.

"Nobody ever does that, but she did."

- So I wanted to know, what was the inspiration behind that show?

'Cause you drew on your knowledge in law for it, but what was it inspired by?

- It was inspired by an infamous Supreme Court decision called Dred Scott.

And in the Dred Scott decision, a slave had been brought into a free territory by his master, at which point he said, I'm in a free territory, I am now a free man.

And he sued, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the court, Justice Taney, who was a terrible Chief Justice, held that in fact, he was not a person, he was property.

And therefore, he could not claim the right as a free man, even if he was in a free territory, and he was sent back to his slave master.

And I thought, okay, that's interesting.

Data isn't a person.

What if he's the property of Starfleet Command?

What if someone would argue?

So, I built a courtroom drama around that.

And I had a very good friend who was a Navy pilot, and he wanted to know what I was working on.

I told him I was writing this script and what the premise was.

And he said to me, "you know when we are at sea and we can't get to a judge advocate general, if there is something that arises, a criminal matter, the captain always defends and the first officer always prosecutes."

And I thought, oh, that's perfect because now I have conflict.

And that was one of the problems with Next Generation is it was, we were not permitted to create conflict between the characters.

Gene very much wanted the characters to be, he literally said, "My people are perfect.

They have no flaws."

And we weren't sure how to write about that, but I finally found a way that I could pit Riker against Picard in a way that was natural.

I mean, everything came together to make an episode that I'm very proud of.

- Yeah, why Data?

- I found him the most interesting character, which is kind of sad when you think about it, that the robot was the most interesting character.

But that's because he had the potential to grow and change.

And the people on the show, because they were perfect and they had no flaws, there was not a lot we could do with them to take them on a journey.

And I think that's why we read.

I think that's why we watch things, is we like to see people, where they go and how they change and how events impact their lives.

And we could do that with Data.

And I couldn't really do it with any of the other characters as effectively.

So I tended to write a lot of data episodes while I was on the show.

I wrote 'The Measure of a Man'.

I wrote 'The Instance of Command'.

And 'Pin Pals' was another one that I wrote where Data forms this relationship with this little girl on a planet that's dying.

Why do you think Measure of a Man was such an important episode, especially for the time that it was written?

Well, it's very funny to me because a lot of people scream and complain about, "Don't make Star Trek woke."

Star Trek has always been woke.

I mean, unbelievably woke from the very first, back in the 1960s.

I mean, they had this integrated cast.

They had the first kiss between a black woman and a white man.

I mean, they always took on very difficult topics.

And Star Trek has always explored those.

And I think Measure of a Man just sort of, in a way, I was trying to write an original Trek episode.

you know, the things that I loved as a kid, the stories they told, and I wanted to explore deeper issues, you know, what is reality, what is a person, you know, how do we give people rights?

And I always think that that Guinan-Picard scene, when they're in 10 Forward and talking, is, ended up being one of the best, I mean, they were amazing in their performances, But I think in some ways it was the heart of the show.

- I feel like that too, honestly, that scene really stuck with me.

The way that they talked about disposable people and how it really like clicked for Picard, I thought was-- - You're talking about slavery.

And I mean, due process and giving people the right to defend themselves is essential to our system.

This is the lawyer talking, not the writer.

And so I felt like these discussions of, you know, honoring people's humanity and even data's humanity is desperately important.

So I do think, I think measure holds up even today, maybe even more so now that we have people in a notorious prison in El Salvador.

- Yeah, yeah, it's really important.

Science fiction is important.

- It is important.

It is important.

- For our society.

So I wanna move on to the Carolingian series.

I was so excited to talk about this one too, especially 'cause you based it in Albuquerque, which I think is great.

So what was the inspiration behind this series?

- It started on New Year's Eve, 1999.

I was with a group of friends, Walter John Williams and some other writers, and we were having margaritas down at El Pinto.

And we were watching the celebrations for the millennium, although it wasn't really the millennium as science fiction writers know.

But we were watching all the celebrations and I said, we're in the dawn of a new century, why is it that people seem to be getting dumber and more credulous, you know?

And putting their faith in tarot cards and getting your aura balanced and all of this stuff instead of science and math and chemistry.

And then I thought, oh, wait a minute, maybe there's a reason, maybe there's something, some things that want us to stay angry and frightened and ignorant.

And that was the genesis of the idea.

And so, I mean, the theme of the book is, it's the war between science and rationality and superstition, religion and magic.

and I come down on the side of science and rationality.

- How do those themes shape the characters and their choices in this series?

- Well, my main character, Richard, starts out as a man of faith and is in a way tempted by the other major figure in the book as Prometheus, basically, or Lucifer.

So we had the knowledge of good and evil.

And he resists at first.

He doesn't want any part of this war, this secret war that's been going on for thousands and thousands of years.

But he's a young police officer, and his whole thing is to preserve and protect.

And he realizes that there's a greater war going on that he has to be part of.

And so he eventually, reluctantly, accepts the role of Paladin to protect humanity from these creatures from alternate dimensions that are entering our world, and they feed on our worst impulses, our worst emotions, and they try to engender those things.

Racism, hatred, nationalism, all of these things that lead us to hate each other, even though, you know, as science has taught us, we are all identical in our DNA.

I mean, we are not that different.

Doesn't matter what color you are, where you were born, we're all the same.

- That is so true.

And I gotta ask why Albuquerque?

Why'd you base it here?

- I just, I love this state.

I love New Mexico, but it's a place where, you know, we've got Sandia Labs, we've got Los Alamos.

I mean, you know, the home of the bomb.

I mean, we have all this scientific creativity.

And then also there's this mysticism in New Mexico, this mix of cultures.

And I also love this state.

I mean, I feel like New Mexico is a template for the country as we become a less white society.

I mean, we do it, and we do it pretty well here, you know?

So.

- When you look at the stories you've told about justice, identity, and humanity, why do you feel like science fiction is the best way to tell them?

I've thought a lot about this, and I think when we try to discuss difficult topics, and it's set right now, and we're debating issues of, you know, culture and immigrant rights and women's rights and all these things, it can feel like you're in somebody's face.

People can feel threatened by it.

They can feel like you're lecturing them, you're judging them.

And the beauty of science fiction is we allow people to discuss, or at least think about really difficult topics, but at arm's length.

You know, because it's aliens, or it's elves, or it's something else.

But the ideas are still the same.

I mean, we can still talk about these very difficult subjects, but in a safer, a somewhat safer space.

a space where people don't feel threatened, don't feel judged by maybe the attitudes that they hold.

And it's a delicate balance, because as a writer, you don't want to sort of feel like you're sticking your face through the page and yelling at people.

You still want to tell an entertaining story.

But you hope, I mean, that's what I talk about with plot versus theme.

Theme is the foundation.

If you don't know what the theme is, the plot sort of floats on top of it.

When I teach, I say, you know, plot is the stuff that happens, but theme is why it matters.

And so if you carry that, then you can bring those things to the fore in a subtle way that hopefully get people thinking and give them a chance to ponder on maybe their attitudes or the things they're feeling or thinking.

Maybe teach us a little bit about empathy.

Yeah, empathy, a good thing.

Yeah, a good thing.

Not in fact a bad thing.

The Art of Now.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Video is really an art form that's of the here and now.

It has a long history.

We have experimental film, which also has a longer history because film's been around since the early 20th century.

The drive to experiment is there always.

What's been, I think, difficult for museums is it's time-based.

It takes time to watch it.

It takes time for someone, either a contemporary curator or a curator with a special interest in this area, it takes time to figure out what's good, what succeeds, how to program it.

And so if you're doing that in-house, then I think the public is hungry for it.

[MUSIC] >> Digital engagement at PAM means extending the mission of the museum beyond the walls of the building.

Democratizing access to our collection and our purview of Latin American artists, South Florida, Caribbean diaspora, African diaspora.

Immersive is, though it seems to be having a renewed attention in the last few years, it's been around for a long time now.

What makes this particularly interesting is that it's, I think, the first time that we've really displayed a survey of art from artists working natively with the screen.

Part of this new frontier is that we also want to include the audience, right?

We can't do this without them and they're very important.

And so there is what we are conscientious of is user experience, making things easy for people to use and understand, they use their own devices.

They don't have to learn how to use an app.

And that's very important to us that we bring everybody along with us when we do these things.

- I mean, one of the most amazing things I think about experiencing art in a museum as opposed to your home or books is the experience of participation, the experience of seeing things in real time with other people and oftentimes that's kind of against sort of the digital experience that many of us have because of our handheld devices.

So we've been interested in first and foremost just how do artists use digital, use video, use screens in ways that are innovative and constantly trying to push the medium forward.

And I think one of the ways in which we've been interested in exploring that is, what does that mean in a physical space?

You know, something that we talk about as being enveloped in the palm of our hand, right?

We're really happy and proud that we have 3,500 objects or something available for people to see on their computer.

But we know that that's one way of experiencing the collection, and that's great in some ways.

But we also privilege a participatory experience.

And I think that's what we're happy to be exploring in this moment with SeaChange.

-What we're looking at right now is called 15 Terrariums by Rodel Warner, an artist from Trinidad and Tobago.

And Rodel works with the native plant life of the Caribbean, and you can see how he crystallizes them as a way of an act of preservation, almost.

And so the result is a beautiful tour through a sort of naturalistic or digital naturalism, you might call it.

(Computer Noises) My name is Fayola Larios and I'm an interdisciplinary artist.

So this is like years of working with the themes of Internet and how we converge with the Internet, how we grow with the Internet.

It talks about surveillance capitalism, that is how a user pays with their own data to have a service.

So that's how it just like jumps from the like the online experience of just like having fun and stuff and then like how it starts surveillance capitalism and then how we like I started like getting like into a lot of different platforms to you to have access and use it and like how like This is just an interpretation of how I felt the internet.

I'm obsessed with the concept of being surveilled constantly, like online, like surveillance cameras.

And that's also my body of work, having all these eyes and surveillance cameras in my pieces.

-My name is Leo Castaneda, and I'm a video game designer and multimedia artist.

Levels and Bosses is a series that I started back in 2009 to try to bridge video games and fine art.

And over time it developed into virtual reality experiences and actually trying to make art out of video games themselves.

And then here in this piece you see the prologue of the game, which is this village of these beings that could be interpreted as future robots or future humans, but they're these amphibious beings, but it also fits the exhibition in terms of a technology-based piece that also addresses climate change in a metaphorical way.

I felt like the structure of world building of video games was a way to be able to do paintings, drawings, interactive sculptures, like anything that would kind of fit this overarching built mythology.

and also thinking of like what is the idea of an open mythology where there's no limits of what can be a valid part of a storytelling practice.

(MUSIC) -It's becoming more and more material to the goings-on of a contemporary art museum that we engage with digital artists and we display their art natively as they have made it.

And so I think more and more museums will be catching on to this and I think there is, you know, with the museums there's always that sort of lag of like catching up to where people are but I think, you know, we are taking a big leap forward with projects like PAM-TV and with our augmented reality gallery, New Realities, and we are trying to appreciate digital art as a variety of mediums.

-So it's fascinating to see, say, what's going on.

It's fascinating.

I was thrilled to be asked by the Perez Museum when the Knight Foundation gave the grant for them to start the online platform.

To me, I guess what I'm always looking for is the poetry of the soul of the artist.

You know, I want to be knocked over the head.

So I chose work that I thought was very strong.

It hadn't and I thought because it's online, because I hope they bring it into the collection, I really thought about 10 works from around the world, representing very different points of view, and they're different ages.

So I thought it's a really good look at what's going on.

A few are very in quote realistic, you know, shot with a camera.

They're political, they're very beautiful.

(TECHNO MUSIC) My name is Richard Garrett.

I am a multimedia artist.

I work with sound and moving image and visual arts in a wide spectrum, we can say.

The title of the piece is Painting by Numbers, composition number six, and it's a series of experiments on sound and moon image, but the work in itself is heavily inclined towards the digital and the glitches and the artifacts and all the information noise that can be encountered in the processes of working with digital media and the translation to sound, to moving image as well.

-So there's this connection in his practice, visual, that has this abstract sound and image.

And the color is just drop dead gorgeous.

So there's something that's so visceral in the way it looks.

So that's what I thought.

It's very painting-like, and it does have duration.

And you call it-- It's not a video, you don't call it a video.

You call it, what do you call it?

- Moving image.

So in a way, I embrace technology and the methodology that now permits to turn anything into a video per se, or a moving image, you know?

- People talk about, you know, death of painting.

I don't know, death of painting.

There's always something interesting to explore with simple tools.

So we want to continue to do all of that.

And I think what we're trying to do and what we're trying to say, you know, it goes back to that experiential conversation, is that there's a history here.

There's a long history here.

And digital is at the forefront or at the present of what is the medium that is most democratizing and also the one that has the greatest promise of innovation because it literally is being innovated constantly and artists need to use it so we understand what it is we actually have.

- The award-winning arts and culture series, "COLORES," is now available on the PBS app, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and at nmpbs.org.

From classic episodes to brand new shows, COLORES is everywhere.

Watch now on your favorite NMPBS platforms.

- Funding for "Colores" was provided in part by Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts and Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation, New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts, and viewers like you.