In her practice, Ann Lislegaard has engaged science fiction as a distinct mode of thinking for more than 20 years. Besides the genre’s capacity to envision a future beyond the limitations of the political and social present, Lislegaard sees science fiction as a means of opening up or expanding what we are currently capable of putting into images and words. In the commissioned work Malstrømmen (2017), the artist presents a 3D animation built around a cyborg as a self-portrait and a narrative based on Edgar Allan Poe’s A Descent into the Maelström (1841). In Poe’s short story, which takes place in Lofoten, the narrator gets caught in the maelström and his whirl towards its bottom becomes a kind of time travel as he passes objects from different eras. In Lislegaard’s animation, the maelström becomes as a contact zone, a place where past and future exist simultaneously, expressing a porous boundary between what can and cannot be understood. Meaning is dispersed as Lislegaard’s cyborg receives transmissions from unknown organisms. Small glitches within sound bites allude to the potentials of other forms of language, sensation and interspecies communication.