Otolith Group - A long time between Suns

• "Sci-fi doesn't predict the future, instead it gives us a significant distortion of the present" Sam Delaney

• we all have stories of sci fi around us - books, films, songs of time out of joint. when we dream about the past, we distort that too

• there was a moment in history when aliens stopped being 'them' and started being 'us', in ref. to people of colour

• The otolith group's films are melancholic, in the manner of Ballard, 'The future is over, It's after the end of the world. Didn't you know that yet?'

• Sun Ra: "I'm not real, i'm just like you. You don't exist in this society. You are not real. If you were you'd have some status among the nations of the world. So we're both myths"

• Sci Fi is about cultural catastrophe, slavery, genocide, mass abduction, land theft. It is about aliens as 'them', 'us', them as us, us as us, the limits of who we are, are not, will be, could have been, will never be.

• otolith's films are a knowing anti-triumphalist step sideways into private recollection, with diary passages which only intimates of its makers fully understand.

• first world imperialism has revealed its limits in its grandiose last-gasp mistakes (iraq, afghanistan, etc...). Otherworld dreams, old and new, are beginning to eek back into respectable thought.

• Philosophers have analysed modernity in terms of the loss of being, grounding, orientation, balance and stability. A lack of grounding, while related to having no roots, no home, the void, reveal a post-religious universe where monotheism has collapsed.

• Microgravity is a literalisation of the metaphors of the human condition. When gravity becomes a variable, metaphysics comes down to earth and into the body.

• Hakim Bey refers to this space as a zone of temporary autonomy, a space-time capable of creating a distinctive alienation effect.

• Seeing gravity as the weird force it is provides insight into the normalising force it has as an ubiquitous presence, actively participating in forming our consciousness. Messing with this, in a gravitationally variable scenario, allows for the questioning of ontological, ideological, poetic and political traditions. When an absolute becomes a variable, the experience reveals traditions of destabilisation, and also histories that claim to reconstruct kinds of stability.

• The context of unstable scenarios, characterised in the post-colonial reality where migrants, refugees and non-citizens formalise these programs of stabilisation. "Microgravity is an event whose singularity destroys destroys all metaphor and in doing so allows a thousand allegories to bloom"

• The reality of an alien space-time arrests normality such that it provides startling actualities through a constant inversion of reason

• "gravitropic" impulses to leave the world behind can be seen in the ascensional cultural work in the likes of Manfred Clyne, Malevich, Haacke, Matta-Clark and Sun Ra. Future lines of investigation can be called "the gravic imaginary"

• Intermodal inquiry in these fields become entangled across disciplines, with distinct authorities becoming meshed with other kinds of knowledge, providing a potential for "unknowing" -- the nomadic, the interdisciplinary, the temporary.

• otolith primarily interrogates the capital and modernist project, researching vast geopolitical spaces like slums and mega-architectures, borrowing tools from feminism: the radical political project directed at tearing down unequal power structures

• their work builds on ideas of what might be possible, a culture of constant transformation that can't be fixed in time or place. this ideology denies ideological, identical, national, or genre based constraints

• the refusal of territorialisation makes the work relevant in the feminist context

• temporal deconstruction incorporates the past, present and future, breaking down the alleged inevitability of globalisation

• their work revives aspirations of socialist collectivism, the non-aligned movement, and post-colonial struggles

• In its conceptualisation of the nature of the event, otolith energises the notion of potentialities, past potential futures , the reanimate bygone dreams of the future that may never yet come to pass

• past events are revealed to be infused with potentiality

• allusions to films never made have played an important role in their mythos

• space travel serves as a metaphor for temporal disequilibrium

• the potentiality of non-linear time: the evolution of human beings into an expatriate species signifies both a release from gravity to history, and a critical detachment from the present. By combining documentary footage placed in imaginary scenarios, their work becomes placed in an irreducible hybridity that renders the division between the actual and the imaginary impossible. or how truth is reinvented on the basis of fiction.

• Deleuze calls this "the powers of the false", not the abandonment of truth but its re-invention as new post-enlightenment paradigm of historical/cultural contingency

• documentary fiction changes the real as an affect to be produced, rather than a fact to be understood

• documentary film is not the opposite of fictional film, it is one mode of it, joining the real with the construct

• this is a radical change from the platonic opposition between real and representation, between the original and second order copy. thoughts and things, interior and exterior, are captured in the same texture, where the sensible and the intelligible remain similar

• otolith concerns the construction of memory, against an overabundance of information as well as against its absence

• "there is an excess which neither image nor memory can recover, but for which both stand in. That excess is the event" In the viewing of a film, representation becomes a generative force, an non-uniform assemblage of audio/visual information that distorts the viewer's interpretation of events by encouraging active participation in cognition and interpretation. The viewer becomes a politicised storyteller in the 'documentary fiction'.

• By giving storytelling agency to the viewer through speculative future history, it is not a matter of subjective fictionalisation, but engages with an acknowledgement of a radical perspective on history that rejects neo-liberalism as a de-facto inevitability, that military force brings freedom + democracy, that equalising buying power is the only way of creating a fair world.

• The Zone in Tarkovsky's Stalker, where an alien ship haunts a post industrial area, could be seen as an analogy of free market capitalism as the perpetrator of the slow death of the worker, the labour market.

• There is no sign of the hopefulness of the 20th century's Non-aligned movement. With the dream of these modernist utopias apparently at their end, the collective force of imagination seems to have dissipated. Nevertheless, in the films of otolith group still maintain an optimism through resurrecting these dreams of "collective solidarity, utopian architecture, and emancipatory politics", which allow for a glimmer of hope in the dormant possibility of the present.

• In otolith III the characters operate in a world of region codes, referring to a digital, copy-righted geography, structured by class based hierarchical access. the virtual landscape is allegorical to today's map with borders to restrict immigration, providing the framework for the current geopolitics of post globalisation. state terrorism, nationalism, militarised checkpoints reveal the reality of the alleged fluid landscape of the post-national world.

• scifi provides a platform to criticise the current reality, as well as reveal hidden truths about today where illegal aliens are exploited by fear mongering nationalists, to reinvent the world based on cooperative belonging and kinship.

• otolith reaffirms the model of film as event open onotology

• the essay film provides "an aesthetic of articulating disjunctive connections between unrelated moments" as well as the option to ask questions rather than dictate assertions about politics

• how do we make sense of the ceaseless flow of information where presidential campaigns and space voyages and presented in terms indistinguishable from advertising campaigns for new products.

• how can you withdraw the image from the appetite for images? through an apparatus of separation, by inventing ways to subtract the image from the narrative that supports it, thereby turning the demand on itself.

• narration truncates the visual experience. in this reduction, certain scenes can be secreted within a film hidiing them in plain sight.

• michael snow's films place an inordinate demand on the viewer by deconstructed typical sight lines, affecting spectators at the level of the body.

• being stuck in space of the frame and continually turning and turning

• temporal disturbance -- research on preemption. power structures today increasingly acts to imminent threats by responding to them before they arrive, creating the future it warns against in order to control all temporal realities.