Unlike the film industry, which typically uses the trappings of science fiction to dress up adventure or horror narratives, visual artists, such as the ones included in “The Future As Disruption,” now on view at the Kitchen, are influenced by the headier themes of the genre. The themes that have popped up over and over again in science fiction novels since the emergence of the “New Wave” in the 1960s, which included writers such as Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, revolve around such things as entropy, the dehumanization of our species within various dystopian scenarios, and the meshing of the object world or technology with humanity, especially in relation to concepts of the individual or gender. Contemporary visual artists and academics alike have often focused on these things when turning to science fiction.

Some of the conceptual art in the Kitchen’s show has the veneer of science fiction, but is otherwise fairly thin on content, deeper implications and meanings, and visual impact. Included in the exhibition are Mungo Thomson’s wood plinth with a CD player that plays an oral history of the making of the film “Blade Runner” as read by computer-generated voices, and Sean Dack’s music stand with a book of music on it containing the scores of well-known pop songs that had their original lyrics replaced by extrapolations by the late Philip K. Dick about the future of America and what was then the U.S.S.R.

This science fiction-themed hodgepodge of an exhibit includes multimedia conceptual art, paintings, and sculpture. Simone Leigh’s two sculptures are disturbing amalgamations that combine organic forms and machine-made forms. Her videos include a loop of a few seconds of footage of Lieutenant Uhura from “Star Trek.” “Back and Forth (Uhura)” (2008), in which the actress Nichelle Nichols repeats the line, “Hailing frequencies open, sir,” over and over again, is a critique of gender and power roles, but is not science fiction.

This exhibition also includes a total of three paintings — two gray-and-black abstractions of circuitry or architectural structures that have reached a state of entropy and sag and droop toward the bottom the canvas, and one brightly colored imaginative work of two aliens performing a ceremony in which their heads split open and their brain matter becomes transformed into beams of energy. There is also a pseudo-museum/archaeological display with modified books behind Plexiglas by Jonah Freedman. “In the Kaleidoscope Room” is one among many other examples of book modification found in the galleries.

Julieta Aranda’s “A Machine of Perpetual Possibility” (2008) — a lacquered wood plinth with a clear and hollow plastic cube placed on it, containing the pulped remains of science fiction novels that get blown about within the cube by a hidden air compressor at random times — is a visually striking metaphor. Viewers are startled by the pop of the air compressor, and the particulate remains of the novels cling to the sides of the Perspex cube. The original material will never be reconstituted, but the idea of renewal and the tenacity of matter and ideas is well demonstrated. The notion that ideas are ever-shifting raw material or dust in the wind is fatalistic and optimistic at the same time.

Jonah Freedman’s digital prints of imaginary urban high-rise structures, connected by a network of complicated rectangular tunnels and seen at night, fill the frame and emphasize the possibility of an overcrowded earth. The buildings and tunnels, which all seem to blend together, are discernible only because they are dotted with lights. Accompanying these digital images, adhered to the wall directly behind two of them and partially obscured by them, are large-scale sheets of “custom pigment print wallpaper,” which are close-up and painterly images of moldering Sheetrock adhered directly to the gallery walls. The contrast between the cold and slick vertical urban sprawl seen at night and the peeling and stained surfaces is quite visceral. No matter how anti-human architecture becomes in the future, it will never be able to eradicate the organic mess within.

The comic book “Einstein” by Mungo Thomson is a series of postapocalyptic images, the tattered and abandoned interior of a spaceship, the ruins of a city, and a cold moonscape with a driverless moon rover parked on it. It has no characters or text and is evocative and clever, but the incorporation of the metal display case and the inclusion of multiple copies of the same comic book are superfluous and pretentious.

The digital prints by Olalekan B. Jeyifous and Matty Vaz are faux documents from 100 years into our future, when an “all encompassing marketing strategy” known as Adverspeak has taken over all forms of human interaction including speech, exchange value, government, etc. Visually, the presentation of these ideas — the internal workings of the PPPP, or Public Private Partnership Program, which takes over the minds and language of the entire race, leading to brain modification and the reformation of the human personality as dictated by the corporate overlords — is convincing in its officiousness and girth of detail.

J.G. Ballard’s novel “The Crystal World,” in which the earth slowly gets subsumed by a process of crystallization that turns all organic life into mineral substance, is interpreted by Ann Lislegaard in her C-prints of architecture and flora and fauna seen in negative in black-and-white. The organic and manufactured become one in these images, and a sense of alienation from the natural world is palpable.

Until August 1 (512 W. 19th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-255-5793)