Suess, Solveig
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Elemental Geography and Geo-Filmmaking: An Online Discussion
This section brings together the emerging female artists and artists’ collectives who represent different angles of what can be called geo-filmmaking - artistic observations of the Earth, be it imagings of the planet from non-anthropocentric perspective or investigations of the excavation of the Earth strata. By scanning and mapping the landscapes, geo-observing and counter-prospecting the featured artists critically expose the human inclination to colonize and administer the elemental and to extract natural resources from the ground. From technological and philosophical analysis of representation of the Earth, to a scrutiny of detrimental impact of extractive capitalism, the works presented in this section highlight the functioning of geocinema in the epoch of the Capitalocene. In the panel discussion following the screening, the artists will join us to discuss the potentials and limits of use of optical and sensory technology in geological and cartographic moving-image making.
Geosyllabus
The Signal & Storms Laboratory expands on the concept of ‘Geocinema,’ which seeks to address the challenges of representation in an increasingly algorithmic world. Most imaging techniques today are operationalised in ways that escape immediate visibility or perceptibility by humans — they are far too complex, too dispersed, too fast. Processes of recording, archiving, distribution, and visualisation of data are overwhelming in their amounts and scales, where the notion of an image as well as the notion of a recording device can be seen to have already been expanded while embedded in geological formations as much as in geopolitical configurations.
Environmental Machines, Datafied Earths
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.
Overland, There's Shorter Time to Dream
The low pressures in the atmosphere over the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts create windy conditions in the area during late winter and early spring. Loose top soils are picked up by westerly winds, pulling these sands into an increasingly intense Asian dust storm. Freezing all activity in its path, these storms have become an annual occurrence in western China, compared to half a century ago when each phenomenon struck only once every seven or eight years. Their movements have become an increasing threat to the bourgeoning infrastructural projects of the Belt and Road Initiative which stretch across their paths. In this talk and discussion, we begin from inside the dust storm. It is here where we learn how geographies that have long appeared in the peripheries of popular imagination, have been central in the formation of supply chain capitalism—contingent upon state support, concentration and monopolization of capital power, and the organization of weather and the environment itself. Such 'random acts of violence' brought by these storms call for an urgent need to shift our common-sense understandings and contemporary culture in ways which are both imaginary and epistemological. While the Belt and Road imaginary evokes a liquid and mobile world of commodity exchange, its political infrastructures are generating closures as much as openings, stasis as much as flow. These new geometries mark not only the geopolitical reorganization of goods, people, capital, and ideas, but also forms of resistance expressed through movements, grain by grain. The symposium will draw on Solveig’s documentary-led research into the New Silk Road, mapping these constellations through interviews, field recordings, found WeChat videos with excerpts from her documentary AAA Cargo (2018).
Making of Earths
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.
Environmental Machines, Datafied Earths
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.
Visualizing climate science: the poster between science and politics
The geosciences play a role outside of the natural, research sciences as agents responding to geopolitical crises like climate change and corporate and military interests that seek strategic advantage in planetary repair and control. The notion of the neutrality of science has increasingly eroded with researchers more frequently becoming embroiled in public deliberation and policy. Geoscientists are being asked to project the future of physical earth systems as well as evaluate the performance of policies (Beck and Mahony 2018) contributing to solutions and providing metrics for “climate services” (Daly and Dilling 2019). How the story of the earth, its climate and ecology, are told, is developed in specific ways, evoking different kinds of value and purpose for different communities.