Approximately Infinite Universe is inspired by science fiction, with its exploration of other possible worlds, its dislocation of spatial and temporal trajectories, and its challenges to distinctions between human and alien, self and other. The seventeen artists featured in the exhibition understand art as a vehicle for time travel, employing an array of mediums as means to move backward and forward through time. Their work re-visions fraught histories and en-visions utopian futures, with the effect of gaining insight into the complexities of the present.

Recently, allusions to space travel and depictions of the cosmos have appeared with increasing frequency in the art world, occasioned, perhaps, by the dissolution of the American space program and the privatization of space travel. Beyond simply referencing the motifs and rhetoric of space travel, the artists in Approximately Infinite Universe employ ideas and strategies associated with experimental science fiction writing, such as that of a new wave of science fictions writers who emerged in the late 1960s and 70s, influenced by the social and political movements of that timethese include Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E.