SIGNALS & STORMS A 6-week laboratory about new visualities and documentary strategies amid growing ecological and political anxieties freeport.institute [00] A Recording Device [01] Forecaster [02] Distributed Eye [03] Stitcher [04] Endnotes [05] Credits 00 A RECORDING DEVICE 3 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. This constitutes the new epistemological condition generally called the Anthropocene. If the image of the earth as a single form of knowing is ungraspable, then the question is no longer what is the earth but rather how is the earth? Here, ‘Geocinema’ is a method to understand how these images perform instrumentally within environments, but also how environments themselves structure and form these images and their circulation in return, each within their own situated histories. 00 A RECORDING DEVICE 00 A RECORDING DEVICE 4 Throughout six weeks the Laboratory explores an extended notion of a recording device, inspired by the feedback loops between science and technology and their relationship to film and broader filmmaking practices. While paying attention to the ways in which the earth— in its most distributed form— is sensed, visualised and interpreted within the ever-expanding technopolitical milieu, the Laboratory’s participants question how this may lead to new understandings of our relationship to the environment. This also flags up questions of scale and temporality, where visual practices are inherently formative of planetary futures which we may or may not want to foresee. The Signal & Storms Laboratory’s syllabus is structured around key figures and tropes that are present within the operations of ‘Geocinema’; the Forecaster, the Distributed Eye and the Stitcher. With references to works by new media theorists, artistic practices, scholars and experimental filmmakers,— the syllabus also includes proposals for projects, as they were developed over the course of the lab and through learning from each other’s visual and discursive practices. 00 A RECORDING DEVICE Forecaster Algorithmic Futures, Planetary Programmability, Platforms beyond Prediction, Eerie Narratives, Intense Archives Distributed Eye Calibration, Infrascapes, Geomedia, Framing Territories, Biased Tools, Double-bind, Bringing-into-Being, Performativity, Selective Memory-Capture, Optimised Mattering, Intelligent Representation, Distribution, Noisy Translations, Haunted Efficiencies, Optimised Gaze, Forgotten Parameters Stitcher Collaboration, Assembling- Disassembling, Fragmentation, Entanglements, Resonance, Footnotes, Peripheries, Open-ended encounters, Alienation, Collective Entrancement, Estrangement, Supply chains of perception, thousands of tiny futures, Stitching/Unstitching [01] Forecaster 01 FORECASTER INTRO 7 As a future oriented technique, forecasting is interlaced within everyday imaging operations. The technique unfolds as architectures, narratives, infrastructures, and data transactions, while matters of recording dive deeper into the depths of the world through the circuits of its images. The circulation of people and things, along with natural resources become inscribed into an extensive grid of risk calculation, where the forecaster emerges as a key trope projecting a manageable future by crystallizing it in present unfolding geographies. Anthropocene as a conceptual framework and as an episteme allows us to move away from the exclusive idea that man writes the history of the earth, and move towards the understanding that it is the earth that writes history, including the history of man. As a narrative device, the Anthropocene attracts the idea of time, space and matter as certain registers of writing. But before embarking on an expanded version of the history of the earth, we shift our focus to universal referents such as the new climate regime. Here, it is important to understand how knowledge is being mobilised in specific socio-political conditions, and which version of history the earth has been recording, or perhaps never recorded. While tracing the ecological and geopolitical stakes of contemporary forecasting techniques, The Forecaster addresses the rising presence of the Earth as a figure within visual cultures and the Anthropocene. Here we are interested in the Anthropocene as a narrative phenomenon that deploys notions of time, space, and matter as certain registers of recording. 01 FORECASTER INTRO 01 FORECASTER 8 Cinematic Circles capital and labor. This overabundance of recording, archiving, and distribution is absolutely overwhelming in its amount and Future Forecasts scale today. This flags up many questions related to how we understand time, but also our cognitive abilities to critically reflect on these processes and their effects. Of course, the development of cinema and filmmaking has The initial concept of Geocinema always been entangled with new optics and recording methods was to consider planetary scale networks developed not only for the purposes of the film industry, but also from science and the military. So for us, the project of of data accumulation as a vast cinematic Geocinema is both a method to understand how these images apparatus, a camera. Here the notion perform within their environment, and also the extent to which the environment themselves structures images and how they are of an image in relation to recording able to circulate. Addressed through the terms “operational devices, has already expanded and images” or the “logistical image”, extensive and important work on this had been pioneered by image practitioners and theorists become embedded into geological such as Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Allan formations as much as they have within Sekula, and Jussi Parikka. social political configurations. To lean on the media theorist Ute Holl, she speaks of how the cinematic circles and withdraws back into the subroutines of the mind, the apparatus, the industry and the landscape. This is something we wanted to hold on to in terms of what constitutes “cinema” to us under this broader notion. Despite it feeling like an old-fashioned word, it has been productive for us as a prism to think through, while understanding “cinema” as a collective experience of entrancement in a shared space, and especially as we are able to move across and explore different scales of this idea. — Excerpt from Asia Bazdyrieva and Solveig Qu Suess in conversation with Billy Tang, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2020 Read more here: www.leapleapleap.com/2021/03/geocenima%EF%BC%9Aa- conversation/ We are directly borrowing from the idea of montage when we speak of earth’s representation as never being one holistic entity. Our interest and connection to cinema refers to the technique of mediating space and time, which creates a potent feedback system, and a particular form of agency as it loops between our optical nerves and sensory experiences via moving images. In the 20th century with the huge development in optical devices, moving images can be instrumentalized as objectifying tools as well as being emancipatory. It is because of these reasons that we are keen to expand the idea of moving images away from their material aspects and to tackle more the underlying biases existing in optical regimes and to begin thinking about alternatives to them. A lot of our work has been about connecting more recent starting points and case studies to a longer lineage of photography and image cultures. Take for example, images meant only to be read by machines such as self-driving cars, read by staff to check the quality of products on an assembly line, or all the things logged in while crossing security. These images are used for operations, which range from science and measurement, to the control of 01 FORECASTER The purpose of data is neither to know nor to picture but to manage and predict — Sean Cubitt, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies, 2017 01 FORECASTER PROJECTS 10 Survey, An archeological project, like many other knowing, which entail short excursions to projects about the built environment, starts nearby villages and interactions with residents In Present Tense with a lengthy survey. The end goal is to to inquire about other possible archeological createa roadmap that is thorough enough for remains and sites in the surrounding area. the archeologists to decide how to act on the These interactions may lead the archeologists Dicle Taskin & site, where to dig the first trench, and what to villages where column bases are Gulnur Guler Kavas they expect to find. This process involves appropriated to be used as foundations, or different kinds of looking and interacting to funerary structures now used as public with the site, through different bodies and bathrooms for agricultural workers. They also different eyes. Through foot survey, or provide glimpses of different temporalities, Filmmakers document “fieldwalking”, the team creates a grid map meanings and histories that are enmeshed an archeological survey, of the site. Vegetation is cleared to allow for with the site--histories which evade the a controlled collection of surface finds. To be archeological project’s inherently modern a process which mobilizes deemed relevant, these finds need to indicate understanding of linear chronology and clear operational and relational a deep temporal fold. Large and fixed pieces time cuts. are marked on the map; smaller ceramic described here. Instead, we would like to techniques in pursuit of fragments are collected, thoroughly washed, This film project, in collaboration with a team follow Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated creating intensive archives, photographed and catalogued for diagnostic of archeologists, will be a visual ethnography knowledge”, which reminds us that all ways purposes. During this process, imaging and of seeing and knowing are embodied. As revealing temporalities that of archeological surveying methods. We will remote sensing technologies function as position ourselves alongside the archaeological Haraway writes, “the ‘eyes’ made available in evade the constraints of prosthetic devices. Geophysical studies, by team, directing our attention to their particular modern technological sciences shatter any idea linear history. measuring magnetic gradients, reveal what way of looking, seeing, navigating and of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show lies beneath the surface, while aerial images knowing a landscape. This strategy, to move us that all eyes, including our own organic captured by drones following programmed alongside a team, employs Trinh T. Minh- ones, are active perceptual systems, building flight paths help archeologists create thermal ha’s framework of “speaking by’’ instead of on translations and specific ways of seeing, maps to indicate solid surfaces. These ways “speaking about”. This approach allows us that is, ways of life.” of seeing often overlap with other ways of to focus on the act of positioning oneself in relation to a place, a cultural landscape, a scientific procedure and a particular group of people who find themselves in that act of positioning itself. We are interested in how the techniques and tools of surveying lead to an operationalized view of a place. This also leads to the question of what is filtered out, whose memories are valued, and whose histories count. Our purpose, however, is not to develop a critical take on the idea of survey or to suggest a clear contrast between technical and social approaches briefly 01 FORECASTER PROJECTS 01 FORECASTER PROJECTS 12 Earth interest on the border between the UK and About Speculative LandscapesFrance which presents an opportunity for https://customfoodlab.org/speculative- Burst readings of potential institutions of the future. landscapes-collective/Subject to multiple complex relationships of dependence and invasion, the Warren is one Speculative Landscapes is a collective Speculative Landscapes of the most active landslides in Britain. It is research project emerging from micro (Madeleine Collie, Marta also one of the most surveyed: monitored institution Custom Food Lab that explores the Fernández Calvo, Rubiane Maia, and observed for shifts in climate, erosion, potential for being otherwise in landscapes. geology and is said to have been one of the It is sited in the unique coastal landslides Cherry Truluck) first geological explorations in Europe. The of The Warren in Folkestone (UK) which we landslide originates 40 meters underground, speculatively occupy as a place for collectively an earthly reality that is controlled through imagining a regenerative institution. Contact Through remote but vast terraforming projects and monitored info: research@customfoodlab.org on the surface. Here the Warren is explored interpersonal engagements as a hovering network of geological stories, with site and across vast underground reserves of disruption, knowledges, journeys, loves and memories, kaleidoscopic scales, spread across and below like a blanket of Earth Burst stitches together tangled plants that inhabit the landscape – fragmented geologies, goosegrass, knotweed, sea beets, sour fig, brambles and ivy, exploring relationality on landslide methodologies, scales from the atomic to the interplanetary. cosmologies and affective Distance/proximity to the site operates as a cinematic tool, our focus (zoom) in constant experience in close relation motion, creating a disrupted/unsettled to the Folkestone Warren. (unsettle-able) reading of the institution through the lens of landscape.Distance/ proximity to the site operates as a cinematic tool, our focus (zoom) in constant motion, An ongoing work by artists collective creating a disrupted/unsettled (unsettle-able) Speculative Landscapes, Earth Burst is a reading of the institution through the lens of poetic tracing of the Folkestone Warren landscape. (UK). A landslide and site of rare geological 01 FORECASTER PROJECTS 01 FORECASTER PROJECTS 13 Ungrounded Taking some ideas from speculative realism, The initial approach consists of developing two new materialisms and geontologies, we different languages to emphasize two different reflect on mining activity (in its alliance visions. One corresponds to phenomena that Raul Nieves Pardo, Toni Navarro, with geopower and global capitalism) take place on the surface (the uncertain life Manuel Latour Fernández, from several cases centered in the Sahara, of refugee camps, anti-personnel mines, the showing the link between energy sources, violence of ditches and war infrastructures), Desirée Quevedo Nieto cryptocurrency mining, mineral extraction with ground level shots. The other corresponds and fossil excavation. All these cases compose to all those operations of non-explicit violence a fragmented cartography that allows us —such as deep mining or the extraction of Extractivist and dettaching to understand mining in general terms as a energy resources— that take place detached practices blur in the practice based on the activation of a potency, from the most tangible reality, hidden in as it tends to view the widest possible range the territory. In this sense, the intention is Sahara region — a land of locations and minerals as “having profit- to use a language more detached from the marked by historical creating potential; that is, nothing is inherently subjective plane through the use of drones, inert, everything is vital from a capitalization different archival materials, and corporate colonialism and oblivion. standpoint, and anything can be turned into videos of the companies involved. As well as something more with the right innovative mixing different testimonies and combining angle”. All this raises questions about the different voices present in the territory to expulsion as a precondition for extraction, reflect the geopolitical powers at stake. the interrelationship between geopolitics and geotechnics, and sovereignty over natural resources. Ungrounded is a research-based project that tries to establish some connections between several emerging fields such as the increasing automation of the mining industry through artificial intelligence, the use of wind energy to supply data centers for blockchain technology, and the massive installation of solar panels that could lead to a greening of the desert; focusing Desert sand is flowing out in cargo ships. not only on the logistical processes that make Gunpowder is being sneaked in against this possible, but also on the legal frameworks international law. Infinite conveyor belts are that regulate this activity, the territorial feeding the world with the stolen phosphates. conflicts they generate and the different actors The footprints of labour interaction movements involved. Although the Sahara is taken as are crossing the energy extraction networks. a case study, this allows us to analyze the Geoengineering is deterritorializing the effects of extractivism on a global scale and deep time. No land built out of territory to examine how it shapes boundaries, policies wounds. Fossils are being reattached to a and both public and private interests. global market. Brands are setting down into a regulatory void. Crypto action mining is hidden in the region of the world’s most populated but land mines. The Saharawi territory. 01 FORECASTER PROJECTS 01 FORECASTER PROJECTS 15 Chrono arrival of this hidden piece of data. The act of typing evolves into a spatial chorus. A Messenger land surveyor falls asleep in a KAST cave, water falls onto his face. Water drips, his oneiric delirium, and the flickering of a remote Iris Long nova, somehow become synchronised. The & He Like synchronisation across organic and non- organic beings dramatically expands, humans, stones, water-bubbles, infrastructures are The film is a speculation interwoven in this pattern/tempo. The nova keeps releasing energies, reminding locales the on the geological and the Miao minority villager’s totem. At the end of political/policy conditions the film, an intense rainfall arrives, witnessing how the KARST area has become a land that of the city of Guiyang, also surpasses single definitions of intelligence. The known as the Data Capital of rain inscribes this memory into the deepest part of the earth, in an analog way. China. Techno-infrastructures under construction are reverted into ruins and desserts (the construction sites visually resemble ruins). The film imagines a future when the entire Guizhou area is stony desertificated, a prediction that geologists had made many years ago. A new kind of “ecosystem” emerges in this “future”, entangled with “natural” and “artificial” components — clouds, waterfalls, underground water, stones, “Tiankeng”, data centers, bitcoin “mines”, architectures. The data collected by FAST radio telescope forms a steady flow towards a prototype system entitled “Earth Data Simulation Apparatus”, which conducts petaflops of super computation every second. An individual, ancient signal from the deep sky arrives, bypassing the telescope’s frequency band, and gets written in the hard drive of one of the leftover data centers — a moment of contingency. The “line diallers” who work as labourers at the data centers begin to type incomprehensible crypto messages after the 01 FORECASTER PROJECTS [02] Distributed Eye What is this form of moving image that refuses to be merely about things seen but becomes also a thing measured, calculated? One that establishes these assemblages of sites, spaces, architectures, symbolic and less symbolic items, and that features how the invisible operations of data are included in the spatial sense. Moving images that also frame the sort of non- images that emerge from signals – from the satellite data processed into scientific management, policy discourse, different forms and levels of impact on the earth. — Jussi Parikka, Art from Large-Scale Systems: Operational Images and Geocinema, Universität der Künste Berlin, 2020 02 DISTRIBUTED EYE INTRO 18 There’s a double bind “between knowing about the earth and the earth allowing that knowing to happen,” agendas of designing networks of sensors seeing into the earth’s crust are twinned by an outward extraterrestrial exploration looking back into itself.1 The power to make value and the power over knowledge collude on unprecedented scales. Techniques of measuring and interpreting how the Earth is changing are feeding back into the construction of large scale logistical infrastructures, as plans for what is or is not constructed are hinged on the dependability of data-sets and their value-driven interpretations. Here we want to collectively think through time and movement which are being written by and into environments near and far from our situated histories— with rhythms defined by colonial and extractive logics, folk ontologies and geopolitical imaginations. We address the co-production of landscapes within processes of remote-sensing, as an entry point into understanding aspects of what constitutes the new epistemological condition. To tune into our infrastructural present, we will take note of the tempos dictating the constant recordings happening around us while learning to see movements that are being tracked and traced. By noting the choreographies of behaviors inscribed across time, we will see that what seemed to be in the peripheries— whether populations, places, or histories— are in actuality essential to its operations. 1. Jussi Parikka, Solveig Suess, Asia Bazdyrieva “Geocinema in conversation with Jussi Parikka,” July 17, 2019, in Digital Earth, podcast, https://medium.com/digital-earth/podcast- geocinema-in-conversation-with-jussi-parikka-d106e66e415 02 DISTRIBUTED EYE INTRO 02 DISTRIBUTED EYE FILM & READING LIST 19 Yusoff, Kathryn. Abelardo Gil-Fournier A Billion Black & Jussi Parikka, Seed, Anthropocenes or None. Image, Ground, film, 2020 University of Minnesota https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/ Press, 2018 situations/157312 Engelhardt, Anna. Radynski, Oleksiy. “Infrastructural Inquiries: “Is Data the New Gas?” an interview with Lisa Parks”. e-flux, March 2020 https://machinic.info/Parks https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/107/322782/is-data-the-new-gas/ Allan Sekula and Noel Samir Bhowmik Burch’s, The Forgotten & Jussi Parikka, Space, 2010 “Infrascapes for Media Archaeographers”, Cubitt, Sean. in Archaographien: “Three Geomedia,” Ctrl-Z: Aspekte Einer Radikalen New Media Philosophy 7. Medienarchaologie, ed. https://www.ctrl-z.net.au/articles/issue-7/cubitt-three-geomedia/ Moritz Hiller. Schwabe Verlagsgruppe, 2019 Horn, Eva. “Air as Medium.” Grey Room, Larkin, Brian. “The Politics http://www.greyroom.org/issues/73/96/ and Poetics of Infrastructure”. air-as-medium/ Annual Review of Anthropology, 2013 Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: https://www.semanticscholar.org/ paper/The-Politics-and-Poetics-of- Toward a Philosophy of Infrastructure-Larkin/7133e9653dd6d3c7 Elemental Media. University 7b20c650c069529ad694847d of Chicago Press, 2015 Cowen, Deborah. Nick Couldry and Ulises The Deadly Life of Logistics: A. Mejias, The Costs of Mapping Violence in Connection: How Data Global Trade. University of Is Colonizing Human Life Minnesota Press: 2014 and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford: Sasha Litvintseva, Stanford University Press, Salarium, film, 2017 2019 02 DISTRIBUTED EYE FILM & READING LIST 02 DISTRIBUTED EYE 20 The Tiny Messanic Forces Between Us Each of the scientific tools used for observation— be it a seismograph, or a barometer— were devices that gave a visual record of the earth activity, and are all part of a distributed network, which provided data towards larger constellations into forms such of weather forecasts, trade logistics, and market predictions. Advancements in statistics, probability and the establishment of reliable time references, allowed for new logistical infrastructures to support markets across oceans. Sean Cubitt refers to such an assemblage of operations as geomedia— that both mediate the earth and establish a relation between time and value. Here, these calculations are used towards utilitarian ends while techniques of measurement themselves are inseparable from infrastructures for governance. Geomedia not only draws representations of moving lands and atmospheres, but predisposes certain ways of environments to form, and others to dissipate. These dynamic relations between the atmosphere, its windy circulations, ships, insurance companies, forecasting weather, future risks, continuously brought into being many elements of our current modern political geography, accelerating the uneven formations of a whole series of relations. The visualizing of land and air coincides with broader geopolitical events, where together they can be seen as redrawing much of the world’s organizational logics. How, then, do we represent complex systems and mechanisms which are not immediately perceivable by and of themselves? For us as Geocinema, we have been engaging with the infrastructures of sensing and imaging techniques, entering various spaces that we regard as constituting the architecture of planetary-scale cinematic processes. This infrastructural take defines our method of initiating fieldwork, where we physically follow the generation of an image. This topic allows us to borrow from various fields of inquiry such as critical theory, feminist epistemology, radical geography, media theory, amongst others. — Excerpt from Living Networks, a conversation between Jussi Parikka, Geocinema and Kyriaki Goni. Transmediale https://archive.transmediale.de/content/asia- bazdyrieva-solveig-suess-geocinema 02 DISTRIBUTED EYE Even before these images, the landscape is already always inscribed in multiple materials and communication enabling technologies. — Samir Bhowmik & Jussi Parikka, “Infrascapes for Media Archaeographers”, Archaographien: Aspekte Einer Radikalen Medienarchaologie, 2019 02 DISTRIBUTED EYE PROJECTS 22 Eye of Heaven For centuries, Guizhou, one of the most These plans are not without their disruptions ethnically diverse provinces in China, has to the natural environment and to Guizhou’s 穴 been the hiding place for exiles, outlaws indigenous populations. Our film explores the and bandits. Located in the peripheral west, environmental and cultural fissures intensified the mountainous terrain, characterized by by infrastructural development through an Ann Chen (New York, Taipei) high conical limestone karsts, presented examination of the histories embedded in the Leon Eckert (Shanghai) an impassable challenge. During the Third geology and the human-made structures. Yutong Lin (Kunming, Lijiang) Front Movement, when fears of international Yufeng Zhao (Shanghai) invasion drove industrialization of the interior, The Nomadic Department of the Interior the government, preparing for imaginary (NDOI) is a research collective that seeks to wars, built secret military bases in secure address in films, websites, and publications, locations here. the conflicting interests between stewardship of lands & extraction of material and cultural A visual travelogue through Today, a technological and economic initiative resources. Our research investigates the southwestern Chinese is reshaping Guizhou. The recent rebranding of technological systems against the backdrop province of Guizhou, this film, this poor province as the “Big Data Capital” of geological, ecological and human history.of China is fueling the construction of massive through various human communications and data infrastructure and non-human encounters, development. With its cheap energy, a temperate climate, few earthquakes, and a looks at how the arrival safe distance from rising shorelines induced by of big data infrastructure climate change, the province provides ideal conditions for data centers. This technological development in this rural push is transforming the social and political mountainous region strata of the region. One now finds data centers tunneled into mountains, annual Big Data is reshaping histories, expos drawing international audiences, and topologies and the world’s largest radio telescope capable of gathering data on signs of extraterrestrial life collective identity. and the origins of the universe. 02 DISTRIBUTED EYE PROJECTS 02 DISTRIBUTED EYE PROJECTS 24 Waterworks as scientists extract data from their The Marshes encompass a variety of water bodies. In the slow sand filter beds at the bodies: historic filter beds built to combat waterworks, bacteria, protozoa and fungi Sonia Levy, Lauren Collee, the city’s 1850s cholera outbreaks, the metabolise and cleanse contaminants. Ayesha Keshani polluted River Lea, a series of reservoirs, Later in the year, algal blooms in the wetlands, canals and London’s last river interrupt and slow the waterworks’ floodplain, a waterworks plant that doubles filtration processes. A textual and audiovisual as a bird hide, a sewage plant. Woven through these sites are stories of a city’s The toxic sludge has to Our project aims to conjure the various inquiry into the submerged shifting biopolitical attempts to manage its go somewhere: socio-ecological histories that flow histories of Hackney human and nonhuman populations through somebody has to through this site, finding cyclical and land ordinances and filtration technologies, take it in. recursive patterns. Historic struggles over Marshes condensed into a single landscape. lammas (common land) echo through contemporary conflicts where local Water is finite. We underestimate its Invasive species turn human and non-human communities jostle Waterworks is an evolving textual and The river has a big mouth ubiquity, its hidden movements and its the sludge into their for liveable spaces: the ‘Hackney Riviera’, audiovisual inquiry that explores the we imagine it to devour fugitivity. Our project understands water home, filtering and a popular communal swimming location, governance of water as it flows through everything. as a medium that both accumulates and siphoning through the for example, overlaps with kingfisher Hackney Marshes, a nature reserve in erases; an unstable archive that testifies to sediment of London breeding habitat. The infrastructural east London. The project moves across and confounds modernity’s emphasis on technologies of water management (flood multiple scales, employing moving Filtration is additive production. And while water is a common and its industrial past, protection mechanisms, reservoirs, image (underwater, infrared and night and subtractive. on which life depends, it is also a bearer of its agricultural and urban drainage, and the straightening of rivers) vision cameras, found footage), audio Its relationship to toxicity slow violence, forecasting dire ecological runoff. Fish and mollusk attempt to control how water moves, (hydrophone and contact microphone is ambiguous and futures. On whose bodies do the pressures bodies become records, what purposes it serves, what futures it field recordings), and experiments in its processes are of filtration fall? Fishes and mollusks enacts, and for whom. This project aims collaborative text-writing to probe land/ value-laden. internalise and excrete the toxicity of their data points that structure to trace how water evades full capture, water dichotomies, water infrastructures urban freshwater environments, performing the identification just as political accountability for local and silted layers of socio-ecological history. a secondary role as recording devices and evaluation of water pollution finds ways to seep around freshwater toxicity. the edges. What nested envelopes We conceive of the project as a buffer of worlds do we find zone between our own practices. As we interrogate our own positions in folded into bodies? relation to the site, filtration becomes a mode of collaborative writing, There is nothing a methodology for sifting through neutral about cleanliness information and critically examining and purity; the choices we make individually and communally. As text, sound and image we are all porous ‘distills’ between us, we move towards but not all in the thinking filtration and immersion as same ways. fundamentally intersubjective, a meeting point for different human and non-human subjectivities. When water permeates everything, what does it mean to flow, to precipitate, to cycle, to accumulate, to store and seep through, to be saturated? 0021 DDIISSTTRRIIBBUUTTEEDD EEYYEE PPRROOJJEECCTTSS 02 DISTRIBUTED EYE PROJECTS 25 Seed Scryers Through a poetic and asynchronous use of “futurity”? And what sort of futurity is that? image and sound, we enter into intimacy with What does it mean to “save” or “store” (Intimacies with the figure of the seed, examining notions of that time? Is futurity equally represented/future survival, memory, knowledge, with the discernible in a sustained tradition of farming the seed) aim of evoking a haunted and more complex and local seed saving efforts, as much as seeds presence. guarded by Intellectual Property laws and global seed programmes? What other cycles Huiying Ng, Luca Lum, What makes a thing knowable or turned of life-death-and in-between states could we Michelle Lai into a resource can flatten its complexity be brought to witness through the scale of the — its memory and futurity. In the context seed? What alternative futurities could we, in of climate crises, food security, and systems tandem trace? volatility, the seed manifests a struggle between commodities and the commons. The seed The Group aims to discover modes of and its scenes might be said to inscribe (and temporal jump and repair through their be inscribed with) a “salvage frontier”. To interest in entangling practices and quote Anna Tsing, this is “where making, perspectives, to account for emergent saving, destroying resources is mixed up, visualities and sensoriums (modes of and zones of conservation, production and production and seeing/listening/paying resource sacrifice overlap almost fully, and attention) in the world via assembly, canonical time frames of nature’s study, use attention, experimentation. and preservation are reversed, conflated, and confused”. In our project, we train our eyes and ears to less readily registered sensoriums of the seed, some of its less addressed scales and life cycles. We aim to work through notions We explore scenes of a of extended duration and ephemeralities, seed’s appearance and the multiple temporalities of rest, care, inheritance, dormancy, activation, growth. disappearance as a lifeform A seed is not a solitary, bounded object, but implicated in regimes and an intense archive of practices, imaginaries, and ecologies; a seed is only possible as a imaginaries of futurity and seed with ecologies of heterogeneous life and survival — how it evolves systems around it. It is a vessel of potential in more than the material sense — just as survival and acquires different lives is more than about being alive. and afterlives, imaginaries, Some motivating questions include: who and projections as it engages guards the infrastructures and archives of with systems of cultivation, preservation, and circulation. 02 DISTRIBUTED EYE PROJECTS 02 DISTRIBUTED EYE PROJECTS 27 The Souvenir of base camp built out of plywood houses, where rapana from the bottom of the sea by digging fellow rapana-gatherers are waiting for him into it. In the meanwhile it also kills all Invasiveness with alcohol, conversations and a joint. But other bottom species. The use of dragas is for now, what is in front of him is abundance. prohibited in most of the countries around Rapanas are motionless and scattered. This the Black Sea. Nevertheless, their use is still Natalka Revko abundance is strange, it is empty. Abundance allowed in Ukraine. It’s even sometimes Hanna Bryzhata of emptiness. In the sea waters, which are justified by some local businessmen as a way Sasha Naselenko known for its almost lifeless deep bottom to fight an invasive mollusk. Imperfection of — because of the concentration of hydrogen legislation and weakness of related institutions Vova Chigrinets sulfide; pollution and poaching that destroyed both are leaving this issue in the shadows with the entire species — the gatherer sees the whole economical circle that has been abundance only of one species – rapana. formed around it. some way becomes a kind of recording device Our research focuses on Scientists agree that the mollusk, rapana It has been only a couple of years since the of tourists’ memories from the beach vacation. rapana — a mollusk species venosa, had been brought to the Black Sea first legal rapana-processing factories appeared that was once brought to the from the Sea of Japan in the 1940s, probably in Ukraine. They export the mollusk’s meat to For our research, rapana is a focus and a in the ballast waters of torpedo ships. Without Japan where it is in great demand. However starting point from which we are considering Black Sea. While employing natural enemies but with effective methods most of this infrastructure’s elements are the rhythms, cycles and lifestyle of divers- various media, we study and of punching, tearing apart and choking the staying in the shadows. This fact brings up the gatherers of rapana, ecological problems of document rapana’s influence shells of the other mollusks that rapana feed question of access while building up the map the Black Sea, the shadowed and visible areas on, it spread very quickly in the Black Sea, of interactions and life with/next to rapana. of infrastructure around the newly emerged on infrastructures, ecology causing a decrease in the number of mussels resource, but most importantly – how the and oysters that are popular and economically How does our living next to rapana affect stories that we are telling affect our interaction and the lifestyle of particular profitable here in Ukraine. it? Its body becomes a recording device of with this species. groups of people. the ecological condition of the Black Sea. Its What is this peculiar form of cinema? What “Alien”, “the killer of the Black Sea”, “the size, structure and shell are shaped by water is this form of moving image that refuses to disaster of the Odesa Gulf’. The war on rapana temperature, flows, amount of food and be merely about things seen but becomes was called by journalists, social activists chemicals that are thrown out to the waters. also a thing measured, calculated? One that and scientists. It has its own narrative and In the Odesa Sea Port, due to the impact of establishes these assemblages of sites, spaces, slogans. It is also being reproduced again tributyltin, which is used to treat the bottoms architectures, symbolic and less symbolic and again via media scenarios, interviews and of ships against fouling and is currently items, and that features how the invisible conferences. The term ‘invasive’ is now being prohibited in many countries — rapana’s body operations of data are included in the spatial critically observed by different science groups. mutates. Its sexual characteristics are changing sense. Moving images that also frame the sort It is not relevant to the scale of the current which causes imposex. of non-images that emerge from signals – from mass migration situation anymore and is the the satellite data processed into scientific same with such a term as ‘native’. Often the While walking along the seashore it is easy to management, policy discourse, different forms intention is attributed to biological species find rapana shells. It is larger and looks more and levels of impact on the earth. although in most cases they were moved exotic than other shells and if you put it close precisely due to human activities. There are to your ear, you can hear the sound of the ‘anti-rapana’ posters here in Odesa. But why is sea. Therefore, it has become one of the most A diver descends to the bottom of the Black the war the only decision we can articulate in popular souvenirs that tourists take with them Sea. A wicker basket hangs fixed on his neck. this concern? How does this narrative influence from the beaches of the Black Sea. Lacquered, The sea floor under his feet is covered with decisions within our interactions with rapana? painted in different colors, with texts and big camouflaged shells, which he collects. pictures, in composition or separately. Above the water, under 37 degrees Celsius of A fishing boat is pulling a metal grid Around Odesa city and the region you can see summer sun, the sea-steppe strip of the south construction covered with a net. It’s called spontaneous rapana decorations of houses or of Ukraine is melting. After some time, the ‘draga’ here and it’s very simple — it gathers small architectural forms. Rapana’s body in diver will come back to the surface to the 02 DISTRIBUTED EYE PROJECTS [03] Stitcher Since cinema itself has once and for all left its classical setting in movie theatres to spread across electronic meshes and across individual or shared screens, its specific entanglement of physical cultures and wishful hallucination returns as an issue with ever more insistence. Former meshes of the afternoon have turned into omnipresent meshes, into a permanent mode of trance, as it were, disorganizing and disturbing what we perceive as presence or absence. — Ute Holl, Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics, 2017 03 STITCHER INTRO 30 Over the course of the past few decades the narrative of modern science has been decentered, rendering ’a human’ as not a value neutral term but one that is paradoxically aligned with acts of exclusion and violence. Following the recognition that ‘western science’ has emerged along with European nation-states and movements of exploration, trade and conquest, the normative canons of knowledge production have been questioned while the demand for a lowered-tone, historically situated, embodied and embedded narratives have now been brought to the fore. The Stitcher addresses filmmaking through practice, in order to directly engage with the challenges of narration and representation within our geologic epoch and the increasingly algorithmic present-futures. While futures and collective spaces feel increasingly enclosed, we learn from key moments within more intimate histories of cinema, so as to register structures of feelings that have yet to be articulated, with their potentials yet to be actualised in our present moment. We will reference montage and sound design as means to provoke cinematic estrangement and other stitching techniques, introducing key ideas on the manipulation of “optical nerves and their time”. 1 1 . Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, as cited in Ute Holl’s Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics, 2017.03 STITCHER INTRO 03 STITCHER 31 How can we engage with infrastructures and logistical processes methodologically, while addressing questions of documentation and representation? Are infrastructures always imperial or colonial? What regimes of power and imported desires do images and their archives reveal? What times, spaces, rhythms, movements or scales do these processes mobilise? How can we destabilise the hegemony of these processes? 03 STITCHER 03 STITCHER FILM & READING LIST 32 Patty Chang and David Jones, Nathan. “Distributed Kelley’s Flotsam Jetsam, Critique: Critical New film, 2007 Media Art as a Research Environment for the Post- Ursula Biemann, Remote Humanities”, Parse, 2020 Sensing, film, 2001 https://parsejournal.com/article/ https://zkm.de/en/media/video/remote- distributed-critique-critical-new-media- sensing art-as-a-research-environment-for-the- post-humanities/#post-7211-endnote-10 Trinh-Minh-Ha, Reassemblage, film, 1982 Dragona, Daphne. “What is left to subvert? Artistic Holl, Ute. Cinema, Trance methodologies for a post- and Cybernetics. Amsterdam digital world” in (eds) Bishop University Press, 2017 R., Gansing K., Parikka J., Wilk E. across and beyond- A Minh-Ha, Trinh T. transmediale Reader on Post- “Documentary Is/Not a digital Practices Concepts, Name”. October, Vol. 52 and Institutions. Berlin: (Spring, 1990), pp. 76-98 Sternberg Press 2016 Litvintseva, Sasha. “In the Free Fall: A Thought “Geological Filmmaking: Experiment on Vertical Seeing Geology Through Perspective,” Hito Steyerl, Film and Film Through 2011 Geology.” Transformations, https://www.e-flux.com/ issue 32, 2018 journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought- experiment-on-vertical-perspective/ Parikka, Jussi. “Thousands of Tiny Futures”, 2018 Deren, Maya. “An Anagram of Ideas on Art Form and https://jussiparikka.net/2018/07/05/ Film.” 1946 thousands-of-tiny-futures/ Tahimik, Kidlat. Why is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow?, film, 1994 03 STITCHER FILM & READING LIST 03 STITCHER SOLVEIG QU SUESS 33 Towards a How do mechanisms of control impact mobility, and the mobility of whom? Documentary-led Something as simple as a road or a rail route is not only a thing or object, but also a relation. They are the physical networks Research through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked, while also being complex processes that constantly open up possibilities as both inclusion and exclusion. The bending of time and space. [01] Closeness is not necessarily about distance between here and there, but rather how close things are, are defined by parameters In the Shadows such as disagreements, arguments, revenues, personal histories, of the Forecaster associations, race. While modern geographies are made visible, characteristics such as scale [02] and temporality are being put more Unstitching and more into question. Despite all the seeing, it has been twinned with How might we unstitch? When we think increasing concealment of so many about stitched totalities; how might things at the same time. we be able to fragment this? How can we undo our modern geographies of concealment and bring into view the In recent years, nation states and international corporations are increasingly turning to logistical innovations to reconfigure lattice of relations, often very violent geographies of supply and demand as they experience a slow- ones, that sustain modern states and down of economies. This is to continue a stable ‘growth’ through older, colonial strategies and tactics by absorbing cheaper labour international markets? and resources in the peripheries of markets. These strategies include new logistical networks that assist the drive of states and corporate conglomerates to continuously seek the extraction of capital in places otherwise untouched by its capture. What is being mobilised under the rhetoric of cost cutting while being more ‘environmentally friendly’, include the implementation and installing of environmental sensors used to datafy, quantify, and calculate with more efficiency. Duration My documentary, AAA Cargo (2018) traces bourgeoning distribution networks which are expanding across vast regions between China and Europe. Along its route in Western China, geographies are reformatted for logistical movements, which ease flows of capital and commerce. While filming for the documentary, I visited the special economic zone of Lanzhou New Area in Central China. People I met had told me that the zone was only constructed in 2012, that they were at the time still waiting for business to flourish. Pending, nothing seemed open while I visited, with the airport in the logistics zone hosting infrequent incoming flights. There is a Territories are becoming increasingly sensed spaces. specific temporality that the zone carried, for example, a sense of Through the mechanics of biometric data surveillance and the dislocation that started to feel very intimate in everyday life. control of human, goods, resource flow, their justification allows for the convenient legitimization of increased militarisation of There is a moment in AAA Cargo where the song Going Home, border regimes. by the American smooth jazz saxophonist Kenny G, plays over animated bubbles as they float over a concrete road. The song was a very reworked version of it— looped, sped up, slowed down. But his music might conjure a lot of nostalgia from anyone 03 STITCHER SOLVEIG QU SUESS 03 STITCHER SOLVEIG QU SUESS 34 who grew up in East or Southeast Asia during the 90’s, where his alternative circuits of survival in the margins of the pan capitalist albums were kept on loop in newly opened shopping centres, with reality. With remote sensing networks now ubiquitously operating his song ‘going home’ used to announce the opening and closing in the background of earthly activity, they are nevertheless of shops. There’s a certain sense of pacification which arises continuously inscribing movements across times and spaces— in through muzak— smooth elevator jazz— conjured when waiting her film, Biemann was insightful in how she weaves together what for the arrival of capital and markets, placating the public. The was missing and what cannot be rendered in their simplifications bubbles placed along with the Kenny G song together obliquely of knowing the earth. refer to David Harvey’s theory of the ‘spatial temporal fix’. He spoke about how by the pure act of constructing high-speed Montage as a technique can work to reassert the fragmentary rail lines, highways, dams and water projects, new airports and when engaging with the hegemonic calculations made through container terminals, would be used to pacify social instability imaging technologies. With the possibility to link and make and sustain their overall GDP. The ‘spatial temporal fix’ would explicit connections between geographies, things and events provide employment for surpluses of capital and labour while that are typically left obfuscated within the new conditions of using up the extra tons of steel and concrete, and reinforcing the modernity. spatial designs of capital accumulation. A subduing of any forms of unruly behaviour, through the promise and fantasy brought forth by infrastructure. Understanding the politics of duration requires an examination of how observational tools produce or make visible certain experiences of duration. How can durations of a space be represented, and how might duration be used as a technique? Montage Ursula Biemann’s video art researches the connectedness of social and environmental issues in her particular essayistic and documentary-like style. Her film, Remote Sensing (2001), roams through the territories of the global sex trade moving us from orbit into women’s lives from Eastern Europe to East Asia. As Defamiliarisation Biemann explores the lifeworlds of sex workers, she invents a Defamiliarization is the technique of presenting what is feminist media topography, layering her video perspectives of deemed to be common, through a different prism. The sense sexual laborers and their personal data within remote satellite of defamiliarization is evoked when the obvious quality of the imagery of the earth. Remote Sensing exposes what it means mundane is stripped, and a sense of curiosity is enhanced. The to sense the world remotely and charts the ambivalences technique suspends the expected in a sequence of events so that surrounding the media technologies used to track, monitor and existing conditions are alienated. This might render situations or sense women’s bodies from a distance. settings strange, while momentarily entering our field of vision anew. In the film Making of Earths (2021) made under our collective Geocinema, it starts off very affect-driven: a radio plays a melancholic love song in the background and you begin to hear footsteps on the gravel. Then you have Jessika Khazrik, who is doing her magic with the film score—her sounds first come in through tuning forks as if they are in the process of calibrating. Two farmers walk past the camera and look up at the satellite dishes. You can sense that there’s a lot more at play within these scenes, with the air being thick with transmission. What Biemann describes as the ‘zone of negotiation’ — the complexity that does and cannot fit into binary code. She begins with the awareness that satellite technology conceals gendered meaning, which calls for a ground-up perspective to counter their abstractions. She looks at the production of the sexual economy, and the geographical reorganization of women at global scale. Throughout, she threads together how it is through their movements which actually build overseas economies, their 03 STITCHER SOLVEIG QU SUESS 03 STITCHER SOLVEIG QU SUESS 35 David Kelley and Patty Chang’s Flotsam Jetsam (2007) follows [03] the fabrication and journey of a wooden submarine to the Three Gorges site on the Yangtze river—once a landscape most Restitching often depicted in traditional Chinese painting, now submerged to accommodate a hydroelectric dam. Wavering between documentary and fictional modes of address, Flotsam Jetsam By thinking with duration, montage and defamiliarisation, these explores the landscape’s relationship to identity. techniques can become conceptual tools to account for the relational and material aspects of infrastructure and the realities it mobilises. These can be powerful when trying to articulate the different scales of connections with something so abstract like global capital, where the distances between sites and their relations are very blurred, convoluted and planetary. Filmmaking in many ways, can be an embodied method of researching, mapping, and maybe more accurately– ‘unmapping’ the complex relations of global capitalism. We see it both as a practice of unstitching and re-stitching: with some films focused on trying to grapple the need to undo our modern geographies of concealment, where things such as environmental issues are kept separate from supply chain expansions and extractive activities, and the importance of bringing into view the matrices of relations that sustain modern states and international markets. While other films aim to create spaces for ‘seeing’ the familiar, differently, allowing questions to arise on their own terms. To evoke something that feminist scholar Donna Harraway put into words; storytelling is a process of thinking. It does not conclude but instead the process is part of the practice. And this resonated a lot with how we think about filmmaking which is very process-based, not just in how the story is crafted but also in the time and spaces which are being connected through moving images, or the people that we organise and share the research, experience and work with. I do not intend to speak about, “The video questions what happens to a landscape when it is just speak nearby. submerged and if it returns to an imaginary state. The video details the process of fabricating a submarine, launching it below the Three Gorges Dam, following the submarine’s progress along — Trinh-Minh-Ha, Reassemblage, film, 1982 the river and through the dam’s boat locks to the reservoir. Along this journey various performances are enacted: dreams are recounted during psychodrama sessions in a swimming pool, a theatrical play is performed in a ship factory, and the actors’ concerns about the process and purpose of making the video are voiced.” These fragmented narratives weave around the submarine’s journey, composing a third narrative regarding landscapes linked to imagination. The film conjures up the acute feelings of displacement in wake of infrastructural transformation while evoking third spaces and imaginations. How can we work with affect when documenting infrastructures that are often at face value very mundane? How can moments and pockets of estrangement in the film fold in many more registers and scales that might not be apparent on the surface? 03 STITCHER SOLVEIG QU SUESS 03 STITCHER PROJECTS 36 百家布 Bak4 Ga1 Bo3 Cinema Marcus, Sallie Lau, Michael Leung, Nanxi Liu A patchwork-banner: Weaving villages together In the wake of demolition and disappearance, we acknowledge the urgency of the land struggles faced by villages in Hong Kong, Wang Chau and Ma On Shan. Land grabs have become a cyclical phenomenon under the developer-government land hegemony in the city. Though the villages are on different timelines of land injustice, residents from both villages see the need to share stories and resources. Drawing inspiration from the village 百百百 (patchwork-banner), we see video-making as a process of weaving villages together. In this villager-led process, villagers first draw a video from the archives of the movement to share with other villagers. The screening, along with its reactions and comments would be filmed. The same process can be repeated for different permutations of villagers within the same village, or from other villages. In doing so, co-create with all villagers threatened with land-loss an open-ended filmmaking process that would accrete and evolve alongside the land justice movement. We hope to use cinema as a tool for social action, and screenings as spaces for political solidarity, learning, and sharing. 03 STITCHER PROJECTS 03 STITCHER PROJECTS 38 Bat Spells presents it’s limitations and the different mediums and categories blend to each other – environment as a space in which various Thomas Lawanson entanglements co-create each other. & Anna Mikkola The trees that are lit with spotlights and fenced off, supposedly protecting the bats from the construction work, render explicit that the landscape is no longer for the bats to inhabit Bat spells is a counter- and make it apparent that the protection proposal to the methodology measures are visible and meaningful only to and for people. of environmental assessment to measure the impacts of Bat Spells suggests tuning into the sounds of the environment and for example infrastructural projects collaborating with machine learning to on the environment. detect different species as a way to engage with and learn from a landscape and it’s species. The high ideals of EIA tools that aim Bat Spells is a speculative landscape, an to capture the whole landscape usually fail, unstable image, a simulation somewhere because it is impossible to create an accurate between a real and a fictional environment. image of a landscape. The image will never The digital landscape presents impressions be the same as the real thing. from the route where the High Speed Rail network, HS2, will be built over the next decades in the UK, and which will displace and likely kill many protected bats. Bat Spells is an alternative Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) tool that is used in the context of many large scale infrastructure projects. As a counter-proposal for the methods used by the EIA to assess and ascribe a value to the landscape in a quantifiable manner, Bat Spells explore ways of recording multi sensory impressions of a landscape from different perspectives. The landscape can be experienced remotely through a website simulation that includes videos, sounds, texts and images uploaded by various people. A simulation in which chance encounters are possible and which is navigated in a manner that doesn’t presuppose certain cause and effect from one action to another. The model 03 STITCHER PROJECTS 03 STITCHER PROJECTS 39 Palace of Palace of Purification is a video piece about the a state of lost natural order, transforming of We are a group of professional artists, makers, cycle of water in a city, told by a toilet in a its own accord. The toilet advocates for its musicians and coders from Ireland who are Purification social centre. The design of the pristine modern followers to also overflow and leave behind excited to come together for this laboratory. toilet flushes away waste and eliminates our harmonious urban order. We have backgrounds in film, performance, interaction with it. However, the unruly toilet creative coding and installation. Michelle Doyle, Kerry Guinan, in the social centre is continuously blocked Frank Sweeney, Megan Scott, and overflowing, putting all those around it There is a strand of curiosity about the digital Claudine Chen in direct contact with their waste. The toilet world and imperial observation in each of our does not comply with standards of purity and practices. We share an ethos in relation to cleanliness, and refuses to hide filth. ecological and political anxieties at present and feel that this workshop would be valuable An unruly toilet in a social Using puppetry and Kathy Acker’s narrative to our individual research and could generate centre becomes blocked methodologies, the toilet becomes a living, interesting new avenues for collaboration.breathing agent - one who coughs, splutters with waste hidden from clean and screams. An oracle of filth, a confidant society and must overflow and a friend to activists and degenerates. The toilet refuses to be fixed, instead returning to 03 STITCHER PROJECTS This is not a cinema about earth, because there is no earth The earth is the result of a decentralized editing process Directed by its metadata It is composite and patchy, manufactured and stitched together into a montage of the globe Geocinema is not earth The Signals & Storms Laboratory is a collaboration between Freeport and Geocinema. Freeport is a creative research As an independent program, FREEPORT is about program for a world of humans, unconventional learning, rather than traditional education. The current academic structures often fail to catch up with non humans, and machines. the challenges that a data-driven, politically confusing, but aesthetically lively society pose to education and creative It is an independent study production. FREEPORT responds to such challenges by putting unconventional creative practices at the forefront and production program of a new type of non-corporate innovation. Using art as a methodology, we encourage both recognized and young led by artists, combining art experts to share their skills and discover new paths in the methodologies with radical entangled, ever-changing patchwork of forces that aesthetically, materially, and politically shape our networked planet. design, critical technologies, https://freeport.institute/ new visualities, and the cultural Geocinema (Asia Bazdyrieva and Solveig Qu Suess is a collective that explores the possibilities of a “planetary” notion ferments and even fervour of cinema. Based in Berlin and Kyiv, their practice has been concerned with the understanding and sensing of the earth of Internet communities. Our while being on the ground, enmeshed within vastly distributed goal is to test new ways of processes of image and meaning making. Their work has been shown internationally, including their first solo show Making exploring the networked planet, of Earths at Kunsthall Trondheim Norway (2020) and group shows such as Critical Zones at ZKM Karlsruhe (2020-21); developing creative strategies Re-thinking Collectivity at Guangzhou Image Triennale (2021); and Sensing Scale at Kunsthalle Münster (2021). They have that can seize new aesthetic given lecture-performances at the Ashkal Alwan Beirut, ICA London, HKW Berlin, NYU Shanghai, Matadero Madrid opportunities and exposing the and have taught at the Berlin University of the Arts, FAMU Prague, Central Saint Martins London among others. They ambiguities and technopolitical were 2018–19 Digital Earth Fellows and have been nominated blind spots. for the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2020). https://geocinema.network/ Bani Brusadin is a curator, educator and researcher. He is the author of The Fog of Systems. Art as Reorientation and Resistance in a Planetary-Scale System Disposed Towards Invisibility, Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana (2021) and co-curator and founder of The Influencers (https:// theinfluencers.org/), a festival about experimental art, design and activist practices in the networked society, co-produced by CCCB Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (2004 - 2019). Since 2018 he is one of the curators of Matadero Madrid’s Tentacular festival (https://tentacular. es/) and director of Freeport (https://freeport.institute/), an independent study program about creative / critical strategies for a world of humans, non-humans and machines. He holds a PhD in Advanced Artistic Practices from the University of Barcelona, where he also teaches.