User:Aitantv/AvP

Synopsis

Synopsis V1: A rumination on extinction for and by lizards.

Synopsis V2: An urgent climate emergency speech made by and for lizards.

Synopsis V3: The urgent climate emergency speech made by activist Vinisha Umashankar is overlayed with found footage of environmental catastophe, apocalyptia gameplay, and popularized conspiracy theories.

Synopsis V4: A climate rebuke made for and by critters.

Synopsis V5: A cautionary rebuke on behalf of critters.

Run time: 04:00

Critiques

• I'm constructing artifice and removing myself from reality, in a safe predictable, 'conceptual', sci-fi space. It's so removed from the real it fails to deal with socio-cultural matter.
• This project puts me in a strait-jacket, captured by performativity. I'm faking it, in a way that I find uninteresting. It's like a masked cabaret. Life is not a masquerade. There's subterrain beneath the surface of appearances, representations. How to go beyond representation in a visual medium? How to get to actuality?
• I feel my practice should just be an extension of my life, not an appendage. It should slow naturally from my lived reality instead of being an appendage. Now it is a balloon I constantly have to inflate lest it deflates and becomes a limp sack.
• This is a chance to play with Arthur Jafa's idea of Affective Proximity, where certain things seek to be next to other things...."It's a kind of ordering or things emerging and demanding to be themselves. It's as if there's a latent potentiality in things."
• Now apocypltic imaginings are far from fantasy. They are closer and closer to reality itself. We no longer need to imagine. The material and evidence is around us.
• Archiving on many levels - footage as documenting present day nature, machine learning based on database, fossils as illustrated archaeology.
• Remeditation - artists such as Poreno - reaction to the proliferation of rippable media - reshape, recontextualize - the apparatus could be a collection of machines creating an image - a lens as an aggregation of information
• Roland Barthes 'From Work to Text' (1980s) - Intertextuality - text as connected to other pieces v a work which is the fantasay of completion - how does one text relate to another
• The images situate themselves in a certain scientific semantic. The images are new yet possibly a collection of old images - collage - interrogate these different strands
• What kind of discourse am I buying into?
• Childrens crusade of 1100 - innocence, purity.
• What's the specificity of the media your using - what are its conditions? what is the literacy of these different domains? What are the semantic or specifics of each medium?

Themes

Shape-shifting / Masks / Mutation / Unpeeling

Devolution / Evolution / Biomimicry

Time-flow / Glacial Time / Now

Monophony / Polyphony / Cocophony

Rebuke

Research Questions

research

• What and how does a lizard sense? See? Hear? Smell? Touch? Feel?
• Why do people believe the lizard theory? Why are the same people likely to disbelieve climate change?
• Why are lizards perceived as evil or conniving?
• In what ways is capitalism ingesting climate change? How is it morphing to make it a part?
• Climate change and migration are the two most significant political subjects at present. How do the two themes intersect?
• Perhaps an Adam Curtis style video essay is the best way to go, but this Lizard Alien is the narrator. In that way we might better identify or empathise with the lizard who points out the mixed messages arising from discussions around climate change.
• Should I be making my own conspiracies as opposed to mythologising existing ones?
• Where do myths come from? What is our need for mythologizing?
• What strikes me in Vinisha Umashakar's climate speech is the frequent use of capitalist sentiments. For examples, "We need a new vision for a new future, so you need to invest your time, money, and effort to shape out future" or "united we rise and togehter we will definitely succeed". Why was she given the podium? As moving as her speech is, there seems to be a capitlist co-opting of even the activist rhetoric. Capitalism is shape-shifting, morfing as it so successfully does each time a political opposition threatens its dominance. Perhaps it can be likened to a predator or virus in the way it evolves as a nebulous mass. There are no leaders as such, just instrumentalised bodies that can mutate where necessary.
• What world exists at the intersection between eco activism, capitalism, apocalyptia, and conspiracy theories?

Manifesto

• Inventing mythologies out of existing materials.
• A theatre of the absurd in which the artist – or rather a fictional construct closely resembling the artist – attempts to denounce systems in which he understands himself to be implicated, using only instruments designed to support those systems.

Arthur Jafa 'I was the Alien'

• "Affective proximity is a thing that happens when two things come together. Certain things seek to be next to other things. When I would flip through these books, I would see an image, which was demanding to be emancipated from the context in which it found itself and placed next to where it was supposed to go. It was like the levy broke and I just started cutting everything up. It’s a kind of ordering or things emerging and demanding to be themselves. It’s as if there’s a latent potentiality in things."

The Post-Apocalyptic Aesthetic

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xBmmn694YI&ab_channel=eurothug4000
• There is so much to examine about mankind when there is not much left of it.
• Our curiosity doesn't just lie with the power fantasy of post-apocalyptia. It's a desire for recovery and reconstruction. It's about patching up our broken world and learning from the past in order to rebuild something stronger.

Simone Pizzagalli 'Spaces, Poetics and Voids'

• "In these kinds of buildings, spaces are empty and unused, yet filled with traces of events that happened at various times in the past, and whose characteristics, qualities and unfolding within the spatial composition we can only try to imagine, while remaining unable to understand or be part of them."

Hito Steyerl (2014) Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise

• "Proxies are devices or scripts tasked with getting rid of noise as well as the bot armies hell-bent on producing it. They are masks, persons, avatars, routers, nodes, templates, or generic placeholders. "

WIP

viewing link

Elements

• Text - spoken, young spritely female / male dialogue harmony
• Hand drawn fossils - layers with metallic, textural, slimey sheen + GIFs of lizard skeletons 3D scanned
• Found footage of lizards in human world
• Machine learning 2:1 moving images
• Landscape footage - stereoscopic - rotating in opposing directions, and unifying

Feedback

06/12/21

• Whose POV? Lizard or humans?
• What if you re-recorded the speech to make it as if a Lizard is speaking? Add some pitch shift and warping. Appropriate the text? Regurgetate the text
• What if the lizard representation was a crazy AI
• What if a GAN is used to create a video loop? Or what if you create one slow motion still where the lips move?
• The video could be framed as an appeal on behalf of lizards
• Cut-out anything unrelated to the central theme - what is left, maybe not much needs to be taken away
• Focus on the ambiguity between lizards as victims of climate change and lizard people predators who rule society.

07/12/21

• Form - could be a vertical video - the square images can be replicated above and below. Make a sort of vertical grid against a green gradient.
• Can deepfake the voice so she aligns to the lizard convention; from the perspective of a lizard.
• Using machine learning to create renderings of the lizard, which we can then attempt to speak or animate.
• After can send to sound designer for post-processing.