2021-06-06, Suess, Solveig, Bazdyrieva, Asia, Suess, Solveig

To observe a total eclipse, one would need to be in the umbra, the darkest part of the shadow cast by an occluding body, the moon, over the main source of light, the sun. Green and eerie lavender shadows would settle as the sky darkens in an awed hush, the obscured sun would black out, like glowing coal. The history of predicting the celestial event was also the history of linear time, storm prediction, the global market. The film circuits inside a cinema-globe situated at the centre of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Thai and Chinese ground-stations, climate research centres, conference halls and landscapes under transformation. Through the documentary’s disorientating gaze, the film unsettles the certainty of knowing by tracing threads of strategic collaborations within a growing network of bodies gathering data on the changing Earth.

2021-03-24, Suess, Solveig, Bazdyrieva, Asia

The presentation will depart from the method of Geocinema, which is to examine infrastructures of earth-sensing data as forms of cinema. Drawing on their recent fieldwork on the Digital Belt and Road Initiative in China and their subsequent documentary, Making of Earths (2020), Solveig Suess and Asia Bazdyrieva will speak on the techniques of earth sensing, vast resource extraction, and present day demands aimed towards battling a future of climate change. While simple sets of data are accrued from geological to techno-political formations, they translate into the many versions of Earths. These large-scale imaging operations feed back and circulate across scales of the body, the apparatus, the landscape.

2021-01-29, Suess, Solveig

The presentation will depart from the method of Geocinema, which is to examine infrastructures of earth-sensing data as forms of cinema. Drawing on their recent fieldwork on the Digital Belt and Road Initiative in China and their subsequent documentary, Making of Earths (2020), Solveig Suess and Asia Bazdyrieva will speak on the techniques of earth sensing, vast resource extraction, and present day demands aimed towards battling a future of climate change. While simple sets of data are accrued from geological to techno-political formations, they translate into the many versions of Earths. These large-scale imaging operations feed-back and circulate across scales of the body, the apparatus, the landscape.