User:Aitantv/AvP

Synopsis

An urgent climate emergency speech made by activist Vinisha Umashankar is performed by an Alien-Lizard President. AvP overlays this resituated speech with found footage of environmental catastophe, apocalyptia gameplay and movies, and the popularized Lizard-People conspiracy.

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.

Research Questions

research

• 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.

Methods

Arthur Jafa

• "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.