This page is dedicated to video posts which signify new directions in video making in the Anthropocene. This page welcomes curated video posts which take forward the agenda of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene (IIRA).
Remake, digital video, 2017.
The geo-constructivist drive aims at reshaping the Earth from end to end – in this sense, geo-constructivism fuels the capitalocene. Our task is to interrupt this project, not to accelerate it. To do so, we need to return to primal scenes of mankind and of his post-human, bionic successors. Returning to these scenes that cinema has recorded after the fact, we will insert contingency into the past.
Now, let’s imagine a primate that would have refused to turn a bone into a weapon. Look, she hesitates, she seems to split, a visual desynchronization interrupts the temporal continuity that relates the distant past to the programmed future. A zeppelin falls in her head, opening a path to a new alliance between the living and technology …
Frédéric Neyrat, Los Angeles, December 2017.
atopies
Latest video update from Frederic:
“L’apocalypse n’aura pas la forme que l’on pouvait attendre. Elle ne ressemblera pas à un événement surnaturel. Le miracle du partage des eaux est obstrué par le trafic d’un port ordinaire, un de ceux où on n’accueille pas les migrants sans doute, et cette obstruction prolifère : arrêts, accélérations, inversions, superpositions, démultiplications, l’image est saturée. D’une telle saturation peut naître la véritable image de l’apocalypse : non pas une décision divine, donc, mais une retombée, sur les humains, de ce qu’ils ont construit et de ce qu’ils ont cru substituer aux miracles : des satellites explosent et leur débris tombent sur nous, ils sont les étoiles qui retombent sur la Terre ; les étoiles, si l’on peut dire, que l’on mérite.” – Bernard Aspe, Octobre 2018
Also, Frederic’ new book, The Unconstructable Earth, can be found here
https://atoposophie.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/the-unconstructable-earth/
The Anthropocene announces a post-natural planet that can be remade at will through the process of geoengineering. With it, a new kind of power, geopower, takes the entire Earth, in its social, biological, and geophysical dimensions, as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality. This shift has been aided, wittingly or not, by theorists of the constructivist turn who have likewise called into question the divide between nature and culture and have thus found themselves helpless against the project to replace Earth with Earth 2.0.
Against both camps, this book confronts the unconstructable Earth, proposing an “ecology of separation” that acknowledges the wild, subtractive capacity of nature. Against technocratic delusion, but equally against a racially tinged organicism, Neyrat shows what it means to appreciate Earth as an unsubstitutable becoming that cannot be replicated in a laboratory and that always escapes the hubris of those who would remake and master it.
Learning to think in the Anthropocene
David R. Cole
This presentation combines excerpts from George H.W. Bush’s speech at the first Earth summit in Rio with a case study of everyday life in the city of Dallas, Texas, and a metaphysical thinking and learning framework from Deleuze/Guattari. The point is to find new ways to attend to the concerns of the Anthropocene which are at the same time intellectually in depth and practical. This talk was given at the University of Madras, India.
February, 2018, Sydney.
Seminar: New materialisms and the sociology of inequality
This seminar featuring Nick Fox and Peta Hinton examines the new materialisms in relation to class and the sociology of inequality. Peta Hinton gives a theoretical introduction to the new materialisms, Nick Fox applies the new materialisms to an analysis of class. To exemplify his analysis, Nick takes the classic British analysis of working class boys by Paul Willis.
The Great Party the anthropocene
What does it mean to be human in an age of anthropic induced climate change? What words should we use, what actions should we take and how did we get here? We’re just wondering, but just wondering is not enough right now. So let’s wonder whereto, and then act.
Nightfall on Gaia (2015)
Directed by Juan Francisco Salazar
Synopsis
In April 2043, astrobiologist Xue Noon [Victoria Hunt] finds herself stranded in the GAIA International Antarctic Station. As the polar night closes in, she connects herself to the Ai-system. She scavenges digital memories and archives of the time she spent at King George Island with her father back in 2015. She struggles between her scientist mind and her Indigenous soul. She looks for old friends, places, atmospheres, only to find herself again. Nightfall on Gaia is a speculative documentary that depicts the lives and visions of human communities living transiently in the Antarctic Peninsula. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Antarctica between 2011 and 2014, the film is an experimental meditation on the future of the Antarctic as a new extreme frontier for human habitation, exposing the complexities of a fragile planet at the verge of ecological collapse, our relationship to the Ice, and the uncertain future for the region.
Director’s statement
I have lived most of my life at latitude 33˚South. First in Buenos Aires (1971-1980), then Santiago (1980-1982 & 1986-1998) and Sydney (1998-2015). Antarctica was always somewhere inside there when growing up in the turbulent 1970’s and early 1980’s in Chile and Argentina. But in 2010 while recovering from surgery I became fascinated by Antarctica again. In 2011 I began discovering polar latitudes both south and north. New worlds opened up which led to a brusque change in the orientation of my work. Four years in the making and after three summer expeditions to the Ice, Nightfall on Gaia was completed. In these years I have learned that Antarctic communities are not locally rooted in places, but translocally routed across places. There is an emergent Antarctic culture which is not place-bound (roots) but are mobile in nature (routes). They derive their identity from connections to a variety of places and they come here to Antarctica to explore the elusive qualities of this place … always in a constant process of becoming otherwise and elsewhere as people come and go and ecosystems change. The stories about this place and people, about its animals and icebergs, microorganisms of soil and ocean are told in the mode of a speculative fabulation. This is just one possible story so far. It proposes an alternative realism where fact and fiction converge to bring into dialogue the probable, the possible and the preferred futures for this southern polar region. as a speculative documentary film it attempts to open up what documentaries can do: not only a creative treatment of actuality to represent the past and document the present, but a creative treatment of possibility to speculate about possible and desired futures.
Black Market: zero hedge//The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
author Andrej Škufca
title Black Market: zero hedge//The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet dimensions 04’05” credits of collaborators text The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Bogna M Konior, 3D engineering by Voranc Kumar, sound by Matej Mihevc, graphic design by Jaka Neon, consulting by Marko Bauer;
As part of the Black Market series, presented at the International Center for Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, 2020; curated by Àngels Díaz Miralda Tena.
May 2020 http://www.andrejskufca.com
The full text published by @flugschriften. It is available as a PDF reader here: https://flugschriften.com/2020/03/24/…
Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene 