1914 – Transfer (movie 2010)

spacetime coordinates: somewhere in near-future Germany

Transfer is a 2010 German science fiction/drama film directed by Damir Lukacevic.

I have seen this SF movie back when it came out. I somehow think it is still an important genre movie, and one woefully ignored I think. I did not see many reviews or many reactions to it. Maybe it is because it dealt quite early with some very difficult and sensitive areas: corpo-reality (Manuela Rossini), class, race, gender, refugees, rising inequality, poverty, and a rapidly aging population, things that are getting more traction outside of the immortalist/transhumanist frame etc

As in the best of SF – it is not just a riff on existing technologies, it takes actually existing tendencies and latent conflicts (even philosophical body mind issues), social tensions and pushes them further to their limits and beyond. Claire Colebrook has been one of the most incisive critique of the posthuman turn, or the new ultrahumanism of transhumanism and why the ‘Anthropocene’ starts from a rather parochial ‘anthropos’ where humanity is actually just standing for “an affluent, urban, Western lifestyle.” Kathryn Hayles has identified how key values of liberal-humanist ideology have survived the transhumanist transfer – and how such a technologically empowered ‘uber-humanism’, a kind of evil twin to ‘enlightened’ critical posthumanism. There is the blaring fact of power fantasies of Ray Kurzweil’s singularity theory that express an upgraded neo-Cartesian desire to transcend the body – the common trope of uploaded minds perhaps exemplified best in Transcendence (2017) movie. The durability of the technological forms of embodiment are always made at the expense of relegating “the vulnerable physical body […] [to the] allienum.”

I have seen Transfer quite a while ago, so it is not very fresh in my mind, but it struck a chord back then, and I don’t want risk forgetting or ignoring its role. The possibility to transfer a part of you – a mental of you that somehow gets neurally transferred into another (younger, more ‘alive’) body is a long been a staple of SF, in cyberpunk and in particular in biopunk’s more biotechnological or neuropolitical iterations of dystopia. Mind transfer was explored at large in the 2002 Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan (as well as in the eponymous series loosely based on it), as well as the follow-ups to that – Broken Angels and Woken Furies who feature the same Takeshi Lev Kovacs, an ex-mercenary recruited to solve a series of crimes and abuses by the rich of the 26th century. Altered Carbon takes this transfer into new bodies called ‘sleeves’ using cortical stacks implanted in their vertebral column to record their consciousness. More importantly this sleeving or even storage of minds and experiences is not neutral, and the body is not just a residue, a supplement. This is turn makes possible that re-sleeving, using this prior backup is always quite complicated not just a one off clean process. There is also the possibility of torture at the level unforseen by mere one time one body identities. Once technologically stored, a future prisoner can be kept for an indefinite period, as well as tortured possibility in this digital virtual world. without bodily endurance limits.

The dream of upraded transfer is familiar to most transhumanist versions of Californian ideology type of Singularity, with the possibility of mind upload as one of the most salient or expected beneficial results of such a technological rapture. The way ‘mind uploads’ are presented and described by Singularitarians or their futuristic brethren is quite naive and almost a direct extension of their constant talk about extending a ‘faster’ capitalist neo-liberal (their business model obsession) into the future. Such post-Singularity and its VC proponents seems to promise a technological revolution, while at the same time being socially, economically and even philosophically quite drab and regressive. It literally is a badly thought out SF, a very un-reflexive and vengeful-nerd attitude to it, leaving everybody (who pissed you off) back and especially those cannot afford the transfer – being condemned to ’embodiment’ and ‘matter’. For Altered Carbon as well as for Damir Lukacevic’s Transfer the ability to jump bodies is not just a technological fix or a result in current advances of neuro- surgery, neural networks, cognitive sciences, but primarily a question of resources, or demand and offer and rigged economic systems. In Transfer African refugees Sarah and Apolain have their own agendas, and they stake their bodies and their minds as temporary storage – in the hope of making a better life for themselves or their children, or even just briefly escaping the horrors and violence of back home.

There is the constant reminder that these mind uploads and mind transfers do not come easy but at a price or a primium price, and that the technoscientific has fused completly with the corporate

What becomes more clear by the day is that a lot of former state life support system, such as health care and welfare (pension funds), even in the rare cases they did not get dismantled (as in the former East) or privatized by neoliberal shock therapy, have been heavily invested in some of the ecological, climatic and military disasters the world is full of. Maybe a generations ago, one would completely ignore such webs of interrelations and co-depedencies. In the UK for exemple, council worker pensions were heavily invested in military-industrial complex arm dealer and supplying the conflicts of this world. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was also partially involved in getting badly needed ‘hard currency’ by any means – sometimes joining the world market of art and arms deals. Even more biological products (one would say cybergothic or biopunk!) such as the blood supply of their own citizens where exchanged for hard cash from their Western enemies in the 1980s, during the last years of actually existing Socialism. Apparently blood trade was the most important source of revenue of unscheduled foreign currency for the health sector in East Germany.

Only recently, Norwegian government’s pension fund (the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund!) sold its last investments in fossil fuel companies. There is a non-metaphoric quite perverse and quite hard to follow financial trail between the investments in a profitable future of an ageing Western (or global North) population and fueling the instability of the Global South as well as the larger ecological depredations and diminution of their children’s or grandchildren’s future. The bad dystopian quality of such news – makes the Western technological civilization responsible for dealing in the most profitable things: fossil fuels and arms deals at the expense of all others. Extinction and future security be damned – lets just secure the shareholder investments! Such security of funds – is now directly and causally efficient in a larger insecurity and lack of resources of a future that is denied to a majority of others. Few SF movies have addressed this directly at the levels of bodies and Transfer is one of those few. Mind transfer are from the start very unequal, or as unequal as the financial flows of investments. Mind transfers follow lets say other flows of abstract, ‘immaterial’ resources that are backed by exploitation and environmental depredation. It is important to understand how such transfer are also about time, about calculated lived time and how this gets curtailed under current capitalist efficiency metrics and ability to quantify aspects that where previously out of the range of capital.

An availability of black African bodies or refugee bodies – makes them prey to biomedical interests or Big Pharma experimentation, even if for mostly benign of circumstances, let’s say with even the best of old, sick white clients. The white couple’s minds that temporarily inhabit these black bodies for 20 h out of 24 h are somehow lost in their own memories and nostalgia and somehow their mental lives preclude or have precedence over the minds (and affects) of their hosts. Their African hosts have just 4 h at their disposal to be themselves. This is a very literal example of LTV (labour theory of value), yet here the ncessary time is just the necessary time that you are you and have one’s own body at disposal. The body is staked and becomes borrowed by well to do owners of minds that can afford in their old age such transfers and are motivated enough by their personal histories, class and cultural background, ethics, attachments etc to even start considering inhabiting these ‘fresh others’. Life is not being sucked out vampirically from these available black bodies, yet they are diurnal vehicles of two Western minds, of a literalized ‘double consciousness’. Their own and their masters (employers) consciousness is located in the same body, quite close to what W. E. Burghardt Du Bois had in mind in his anticipative critique, even before such technologies where dreamt of. Also we are taking about some form of renewable energy – not the old lifeforce, but the lived experience of these people. Black bodies have also been an image of white ‘lust’, quite differently invested with libidinal energies. These is also made pulp – clear (somehow much to clear and spelled out) in the recent Lovecraft Country series where there is a back and forth shape-shifting (as well as gender shifting) from white women into white men and from black women bodies to white women bodies. We are not talking about the right-wing misgenation narratives of degeneracy and eugenics, but of black refugee bodies as the salvation of a Western aging world. Black bodies are presented iconically and in advertising as fit, sporty, wild, etc as a place of Western projection, white desires and fears. Black Marxism has been key in giving due importance to this transaltlanic trade, its vertebral centrality at the core of incipient Agricultural and Industrial Revolution. The Transatlantic Slave Trade – has been violently and forcefully already physically transferring bodies of already debased or abjected (non)humanity. Biopunk’s transference of minds or renewal of bodies has to always deal with this history that is so present in Afrofuturist SF. The transatlantic Trade was a first Atlantic transfer – that reduced and commodified these enslaved populations trough a brutal regime of free trade transfers and circulation by effectively transforming them into disposable things and mere disposable bodies (many have died being transported under horrific conditions and then thrown overboard). The massive tragedy of the refugee crisis, transiting under terrible, inhuman conditions Mediterranean also speaks about transfers and bodily displacement and annihilation. Only this year more than 1000 people have died trying to reach European shores and this is also a continuation and a reminder that high-tech technological “transfer” is only one side of the coin, that cannot detach other forms of bodily exploitation from their underlying historical factors.

This is also the pitfall of an easy – occupation, especially in a situation of inequality, where all purpose, all intentionally is somehow subsumed to the Western individualized, monadic and agential technosubject. Such total apathy and total occupation is always impossible. The total dream of perfect transfer is based on the fallacy that a person would reside just in one’s own dead, brain or be defined only as a narrow yet ruling consciousness. To restrict interior experience only to conscious experience is blaring mistake and one that has been repeatedly made in the history of Western philosophy from Descartes to Kant. The privileging of mind over matter has been slowly collapsing in the face of a “strange or weird sort of realism”(Levy Bryant) that admits the radical unkownability of things and way every entity, from human bodies to insect swarms to bacteria to comets exists regardless of whether one bothers to think about them or not. Consciousness is indeed something quite peculiar and special, but in no way essential (as in the ‘hard problem of consciousness‘). Consciousness is differing from many other, more diffuse, and more graded non-human sentient experiences and is just one of widely distributed modes of thought and feeling developed and existing all around us. It is important to emphasize that the difference is only in degree, not in kind. A proper evolutionary account of human consciousness has to take this wide spectrum of sentience seriously. Transfer is not neutral to its substrate, nor is it about the perfectibility of transfer. It gathers momentum after a slow burn for the possibility that cross-overs of all sorts are happening, nothing staying the same or isolated (as just body or minds). Consciousness, POW, perspectives get changed as they get transferred, expanded and dilated by these literal in’s and out’s of each other’s embodied experiences.

Nothing could be more bizarre as this picnic that seems to get closer to Get Out, although getting out is actually always linked with someone other getting in

Unintended pregnancies are some of the worst cases of breeder culture SF, where everybody stumbles into it accidentally, especially in places where it is widely available. Such accident always feel scripted. Apart from this emplotment fluke that is not a fluke, there is also the possibility that the older white women actually enjoys her surrogate bodies pregnancy. Sarah the real cum surrogate mom realizes that she will be just a ‘womb’ and somehow giving her baby to adoption is the only choice. Although it is just starting, here the terms of appropriation are all biocultural – in a patriarchal capitalist society where women’s bodies from the Global South are already carrying out this reproductive labour in the name of white ‘low natality’ rich others. Full Surrogacy Now! starts with the current situation but asks for reproductive equality and justice. Cultural appropriation (ex white rap) somehow precludes the fact that identity politics goes and in hand with a rapid commodification (like in the nativist Nike logos) of the ‘native’ or or the ‘indigenous’. Indigenous knownledges that gets deleted at the same time as more material, biological forms of biocapital get indexed and turned into ‘green gold’. In biopunk such as Paolo Bacigalupi Wind Up Girl – follows these constant and hard to represent transfer of seeds, cultivars, genes, bodies, hybrids – mined and escaping from the agroindustry biotech labs. as well as traded by biohackers that are in a constant search for seeds, breeds and long lost or potentially valuable and forgotten heirlooms cultivars.

Bodies and their feelings (good or bad) also get rapidly appropriated in this biopunk world of genetic copyrighting and bio hunting. This is why movies such as Transfer are needed in order to follow up on those consequences and think the unthinkable of unlivable situations. Not sure how the movie ends, I would have to see it one more time, yet according to other reviewers, it appears to be another bad deal in the sense that the African parents are actually remunerated with just 1% for their troubles.

review

imdb

1912 – Jungle Cruise (2021)

spacetime coordinates: 1916 London > Brazil / the Amazon

imdb   /   wiki

1911 – Tides aka The Colony (movie 2021)

spacetime coordinates: in the not too distant-future of a devastated Earth

Tides (also known as The Colony) is a 2021 German-Swiss science fiction thriller film directed and written by Tim Fehlbaum. In the not too-distant future: after a global catastrophe has wiped out nearly all of humanity on Earth, Blake, an elite astronaut from Space Colony Kepler. must make a decision that will seal the fate of the people on both planets.(wiki)

Tides is a small independent European SF – that I have seen together with the recently released Settlers. Very different from Settlers that plays on a future biodome Mars that feels like a Marstern (?) that tips it hat over to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, rather than Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star. Nevertheless they both exbit a contemporary preoccupation, not to say anxiety around what Dominic Pettman has termed Peak Libido or what Rebekah Sheldon identified as a common thread in recent SF as “The Child to Come” of Generation Anthropocene.

Demographic fears, low fertility etc are part of contemporary ‘breeder culture’ baggage that sees to be hailed along movies as different as Interstellar (2014) and Children of Men (2006). It is also part of the usual pro-Family values propaganda of an unlikely alliance between free market warriors and traditionalists. I am not saying they endorse this way of thinking, although breeder culture is to be found everywhere from Ikea adverts to political campaigns. SF does what it does best if it keeps receiving all of these vibrations yet it splits the spectrum, trying out other outcomes, changing conclusions, sometimes against the premises or the initial (even unspecified) presuppositions.

Demographic fears coupled with anti-immigrant sentiments, homophobia, transphobia and ethno-politics, has become a familiar tune that seems to afflict and flare up nationalistic fervor diverting attention from unsolved wide income disparties, lack of opportunities, dissatisfaction with working conditions. unemployment or climate change. Restarting or jumping back into productivity mood has been difficult for many after having their time back after so much lack of time and probably old fears and insecurities abound. Again I want to emphasize, I do not dismiss the reality of these concerns and fears, considering just that they do not go wide enough, or comprehensive enough. ‘Replacement’ fears and discussions online are easy to ridicule or to join into, there virality is demonstrated, what is more difficult to grasp is their underlying, unspoken larger concerns or what is left out of them. There is a sense in which it is good to take seriously the idea that the planet has an “expiration date”. The simple, banal, very basic observation, that translates from products onto planetary matters and towards our overall growing obsolescence is far from being just cursory or trivial matter. Yet the conjunction btw commodities, unstoppable productivity, climate trouble, job making and job killing, entire failed cities, genomic-capitalist intertwining etc seems to escape our SF imaginary, only then entering only once it is SF entering the bounds of what cannot happen yet happens.

The rapid and growing aging population and what is seen as a failure to reproduce (reproduction of the rapidly obsoleted workforce!) seems to take precedence as a major obsession all around the so-called developed world. Increased technological prowess, high living standards and higher education is coupled with lower reproduction rates and thus becomes always an easy propaganda tool banded about or inserted into conspiracy materials that energize right-wing ‘replacement’ paranoia. QAnon pedophilia rings built on older antisemitic conspiracy memes derived from a poor understanding of kosher traditions as well as blood symbolism add to that. Children are being suddenly invested with this double sacrificial value and also hope for a confiscated future. Children become the ultimate object of vulnerability and globalist abuse. What is evident is that they are suddenly in opposition with older interests, with entire generation that seem to have spent the future’s chances beforehand. Not only reproduction is at stake, but children constant status as sacrificial lambs, as the primary target of satanist plots and elite perversion. It is intersting this shift from the 1970s fear that we are eating our old (in 1973 Soylent Green) to the current children being the hidden cost behind what we see around (just think of 2013 Snowpiercer). In a sense we seem to have reverted to the Victorian fears about the early workforce that did not magically disappear but was moved out of sight in sweatshops all over the world. This also obsession with satanist rings pastes over some of the most demonic and atrocious attempts at forced urbanization, brutal nation-making and colonial education projects, including the criminal ineptitude and squalor of modern civilizing projects in the ‘New World’ that targeted mostly indigenous children. What is also new is also China’s joining the aging trend, and the associated demographic fears from this powerhouse of the world, made it life its One Child Policy and start pushing cash for families with more kids.

Firstly a few things on the aesthetics of Tides – it is quite a beautiful cinematography, a sort blueish extended beach world (North Sea? Reminded me of Kiel or Gdansk?). Earth is seen mostly as abandoned harbors, inundated coast. Imagine all the hubs of international maritime trade and supply chains of today being now derelict places populated by the newly formed societies that have reverted to small, scattered, scavenger gatherer-fishermen tribalism. My only critique is that somehow these maritime folk do not really appear plausible in the movie. Where is the whole range of adaptations of real Sea Nomands or Sea Gypsy austronesian, Han or Indian etc people? These existing people together exhibit an incredible much more diverse range of architectures, lives and a much more tight connection with water that is far more convincing somehow (see Man on the Rim 1988). The mudflats like the mangrove are a very specific and hugely important route of migration for contemporary maritime populations as well as for older prehistoric peoples. Yet, I appreciate the effort in building and suggesting such a clific future post-climate change world.

That being said, the vast horizon, the light and the misty, rusty musty atmosphere of the place transports you out there among the new tribalism of future Earth. These tribes find themselves in a neo-colonial situation – as the technologically advanced returnees from the elite ruling class colonies return to Earth, take over and start educating and ‘civilizing’ the remains of woman/mankind. This top down attitude never worked out. Earth seems to miraculously bring back their fertility and so secretly the elite explorers start siring their own offspring in relative secrecy before giving information back to their home colony. This brings to me several recent scandals, as the 2018 Oxfam sex exploitation scandals in Haiti after the devastating earthquake and a dark history of international aid charities. The capitalist charitable spirit is also plagued by a certain Malthusian preference and bias in practice. Availability to contraception methods is vital all over the world, yet Population Bomb fears generally end up in targeted population controls, state-sponsored forced sterilization campaigns and skewed family planning (aptly described by Mytheli Sreenivas), that contrary to the Western ‘replacement’ conspiracies, do not target the Global North, but take underdeveloped and unprotected areas of the world as their terrain for clinical trials or as lop-sided charitable action.

The transhumanist elites that settled on an off-world colony become sterile and cannot reproduce (mysteriously) after some sort of Peak Libido, seemingly also because they have been using some dubious eugenics or genetic screening methods. Negative biopolitics is a boring staple of SF dystopia (Brave New World, GATTACA etc), yet here the elites have to deal with the limits of their technology (bodies?) and with material consequences of their action. Having a small gene pool was never a good idea and a presumably grooming for an elite genome speaks about how intimately genomics has been subsumed into the abstractions of capital (as detailed by Eugene Thacker in Global Genome).

The expedition on Earth crash lands and the surviving female pilot gets trapped into local power plays and skirmishes that turn out to be not conflicts over resources but conflicts over demographic politics,kidnapping children and abusing (or at least trying to control) ‘native’ terrestrial women. The colonist men’s access and ultimate dependence on local women’s reproductive cycles seems to drive a lot of current right-wing pro-Family propaganda. So this SF, in its small wy is trying to think trough some of these questions. Tides strives for honesty and non-masculinist take on things, outing the hypocrisy behind such selfish concerns, uncovering a masculinist dogma that somehow got embedded into the laws and cultural customs of Maid’s Tale as well (and similar real-life examples). That is whenever women get reduced to just ‘mobile wombs’. Extinction and X-Risk as such, and as more probable and calculable risk is an absent topic somehow, seemingly drowned by the movie’s Elites own self-preservationist and classist modus.

Tides also combines something like the old The Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now by Joseph Conrad with It Is Hard to Be a God concerns over interventionism by Strugatsky Brothers, yet it is still an interesting mix, managing to steer as along a difficult return to future Earth.

Mudflats or Wattenmeer

1907 – The Alchemist Cookbook (2016)

spacetime coordinates: woods of Michigan sometimes after 2000

The Alchemist Cookbook is a horror film directed by Joel Potrykus. The film was released on the 7th of October 2016 in New York City.  Sean” is an outcast who isolates himself from society to practice alchemy, accompanied by only his cat. As his mental condition deteriorates the line of what is real and what is not becomes blurred, and as his home kitchen chemistry turns to black magic, he instead summons a demon.The cast only contains two human characters starring Ty Hickson as Sean and Amari Cheatom as Cortez. Other notable characters include the Cat Kaspar and a possum. The cast is notable as it consists of only African American actors, a conscious choice to “take the white people out of the movie” by the director Joel Potrykus. (wiki)

There is no other movie about contemporary alchemy I would recommend more than this one. In a sense this genre breaking of horror, black commedy, supernatural thriller, demonic possession – sez something about the alchemical dabbling of its director that manages to establish these lonely figures not just as figures of pity, of just misguided or heavily medicalized labour force of today.

They all that as well as 21st c eremites, forever loners and over-qualified loosers that try to achieve the impossible which nowadays is fairly everything that was deemed possible only a few generations ago such as a decent job, some sort of stability and free health care.

What they get, is what Michael Taussig identified long ago in South America Columbia coca plantations as the new demonology of capital that maltreats, transform labour into dead labour, and possess everything. This demonology is at large in the woods of Michigan as well. Oxy and other Perdue Pharma products that have been choreographing the pain epidemic in the US Midwest are the sort of additives, the transformative blackout addictive and legal (FDA approved) substances, readily available alchemy that leaves nobody untouched. Potrykus seems to never aim for re-enchantment but somehow, in the midst of disaster and wilderness keeps us close to the low residues of broken quests.

And this is not the quest of Silicon Valley, of quantum computing or of immortalist future-addicted entrepreneurs, but of somebody who is trying to make ends meet and uses the most banal, lowly substances (fast food trash) – peanut butter, Doritos, all the toxic Cola sugary drinks dirge to enact the last invocation, to achieve some sort of disturbed and horrifying immortality in front of continuous demonic attacks, paranoia and hidden commands.

Being prone to nevrosis and increasing bouts of bipolar trouble (what was previously officially labeled as obsessive compulsive) gets a different urgency by being at the center of transformative and metamorphic processes. Some antrhopologists made an important observation – that there is lots of historians, people researching history and aware of changing historical timelines, but there is few who try to understand the processual nature of things, how one things becomes another and under what circumstances. How the change keeps on changing in its turn as Whitehead would say. There are certain alchemical processes at work here that keep on deteriorating, mutating and benumbing bodies and minds. In a sense there is nothing raw, everything is already alchemically modified the instant it is in contact with the elements, with weathering, oxidative or enzymatic non-human reactions. Yet we have arrived from the processed (pickled by bacteria and yeasts, dried by the sun, salted etc) to the age of ultra-processed products.

At the same time, it is an endless delight to compare and find parallels btw early imagery of alchemy and alchemists and this contemporary disciple.

imdb

1906 – Relaxer (movie 2018)

spacetime coordinates: Michigan 1999 just before the 2YK end of the world

Relaxer is a 2018 American comedy film written and directed by Joel Potrykus. Set in 1999, it tells the story of a man playing Pac-Man in a living room.

Have to thank Felix from Mabento for suggesting this one yr ago, which I ignored, and only now managed to watch. Potrykus also directed one of the all-time favorites – The Alchemist Cookbook (2015) based on David Henry Thoreau stint of living near Walden building around themes as slackness and loneliness. The cinematography of Potrykyus I find one of the most interesting developments of indie low-budget US cinema in recent years, that combines brash oddity, a certain perpetual quest element maybe even picaresque one (akin to 1975 Barry Lyndon) with a heavy dose of grossness, a new sincerity about meltdown and a freshly non-neurotypical candor dressed in black comedy garments. It endorses an unprepossessing (unstudied?) unpretentious braindead attitude about the world we leave in – maybe a jackass type of “critical stupidity” (Scott Richmond) that unites the avant-garde techniques of disturbance with online stunts & pranksterisms. I would also include Kajillionaire directed by Miranda July there. Altough completly stuck the main protagonist oozes forth some continuous fount of animal magnetism & obnoxious liquids.

Relaxer could well be the ode to the gamer martyr, a supernatural 1990s Midwestern take on Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, it also pitilessly transforms and ridicules all stereotypes of survivalist preppers, or what it takes to pull trough various challenges, endless gamification challenges and severe isolation without directly decrying the situation or pointing fingers. Relaxer is a new Millennial species, he is not just a couch potato, or the staycation victim of the year of quarantine, he is almost a life long slacker that always strives to reclaim his time back (like C Mudede sugested in a recent article) instead of joining the labour force or finally starting to be able to pay his rent or move out of his mom’s flat. It is also a generation that did not join the startup Californian culture, and that also became its complete antithesis, a sort of ungainly anti- entrepreneurs of slackerdom. This typology is usually vilified in movies – starting with the serial killer stereotype till the white trash family in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). Survival here is not preparing against the government trying to take my gun, it might mean (here) finishing playing the n (impossible) level of Pac- Man, riding the glitch or managing the infinitesimal reflexes thats sacred cheat sheet scrolls of others promise. Maybe this is also the living catacomb of hardcore music and postpunk mashup with gaming culture (see the numerous Black Flag and Butthole Surfers, grunge posters on the walls). Survivalist logic is decomposing into a bizarre Robinson Crusoe stuck in his home, the archetype self entrepreneur in his (or his bothers) primordial flat, setting up a weirdo freelance business of impossible prize money offered by Nintendo magazine challenges.

This is a mostly fixed camera movie, just with one character entering a progressive state of taped decrepitude and self-neglect, almost sliding into voluntary homelessness, while at the same time retaining some modicum of re-enchantment, of derisory acquired special jedi ‘powers’. These powers are unclear, if they are conveyed by pulp trash or commercial pop, or useless skills allowing you to actual survive the new austerity of a mechanical Turk, that we will never know. What I appreciate is the brake from the redemptive narrative of Matrix, of messianic Neo pulling himself up or making ‘poor’ sheeple understand that we are just an appendix to machines. There is nothing redemptive to this alternate history of the 2YK and why the dotcom world actually ended or why we are its children, always ready to pick up on the next senseless challenge. Stylistically very diverse, Relaxer also features one of these incredible moments – that could be picked out of the best noir memories, with marvelous actress (+singer) Adina Howard starring as nurse Arin, a rare friend and ex colleague that is able to transmit secret knowledge (the cheat sheet scrolls), offering the only rare moments of genuine care. There’s this sequence where Cortez (from the Alchemist Cookbook), her companion standing in the door tries to rush her adding a few homophobic slurs, while she calmly takes the guy apart, completly switching the whole movie into something else related to what’s more and more unacceptable & harder to ignore. Even the Darth Vader 3D glasses – Scanners like Cronenbergian mind tricks find a way to feel all right & appropriate to the dark comic & cloying situation.

Don’t want to give the false impression, this is both an incredibly funny and painful to watchmovie – nothing happens, yet at the same time, here we have a reality desert eremite, ignoring the outside apocalypse as he in more ways than one brings it about. We are never sure if this is just mental games, finding ways to deal with one’s own insignificance or inability to adapt, or just a paen to that have shown us that relaxation never comes easy, that being at home doing basically nothing is still an uphill battle toward relaxation.

imdb

1905

Kingdom (TV Series 2019– )

spacetime coordinates: Set during Korea’s Joseon Dynasty, three years after the Imjin War. (the Japanese invasions of Korea 1592–1598 – three years after the famous “Battle of Unpo Wetland”)

Kingdom (Korean: 킹덤; RR: Kingdeom) is a 2019 South Korean political period horror thriller streaming television series, created and written by Kim Eun-hee and directed by Kim Seong-hun and Park In-je. The series is adapted from the webcomic series The Kingdom of the Gods, which was authored by Kim Eun-hee and drawn by Yang Kyung-il.

Set on a fictional, medieval-inspired Joseon, Kingdom explores the story of a Crown Prince, as he sets to investigate the source of a mysterious plague that begins to ravage his country. It stars Ju Ji-hoon, Ryu Seung-ryong, Bae Doo-na, Kim Sang-ho, Kim Sung-kyu and Kim Hye-jun. // wiki // imdb)

A special feature-length episode of the series, titled

Kingdom: Ashin of the North (TV Episode 2021)

was released on July 23, 2021 and focused on the supporting character Ashin played by Jun Ji-hyun.

The episode acts as a sidequel to the second season of Kingdom and explores the backstory of Ashin, the mysterious heir of the Northern Seongjeoyain tribe village, and the origin of the resurrection plant that triggered an unprecedented cascade of tragic events that swept through the Kingdom of Joseon. // wiki // imdb

1904 – Ar Condicionado (2020 movie)

Air Conditioner (Portuguese: Ar Condicionado) is a 2020 Angolan film directed by Fradique (Mário Bastos). The film was shot in 2020 in Luanda by Generation 80. (wiki)

Music: Aline Frazao http://www.alinefrazao.com/

One would expect everyone to at least try to bunk into the new wave of Afrofuturist or Africanfuturist (also in the sense developed by the black diasporic SF or experimental music – Detroit techno aquatic Drexciya world diving) that allowed such a plethora of both and new black Speculative Fiction literature to be written and published (for example Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon). I do not particulary care if this Angolan director was educated in NY or if Mubi – the place of art house small movies (for a small fee) was involved in its making and promotion.

I find that is it decidedly rare that new Afro- or African futurist narratives, histories, speculative worlds make it onto screen, possibly because they exist separately as music videoclips or stand alone movies without literary support. While I do not think in any way that rarity or scarcity makes things automatically more precious, I find it always an incredible surprise to see such a movie being made and circulated. You could call it an extended videoclip, but this is just the more reason to watch it. It is clearly an ode to Luanda city, but also, for me at least, it gestures towards the perfect mix in the sense of teaching us true cosmpolitanism while never giving up on the cosmospolitics of that particular place. Good riddance to the Euroamerican certitudes & obnoxious art house pretense.

It is a universal or dispersed planetary decrepitude, without pushing for the universality or for the so-called atemporal qualities. It speaks of weather, or climate change as it is experienced by a majority in an unmistakable way nowadays. It is climatic without spelling out climate crisis commonplaces. It is ultimately a drift or drop into high weirdness climax that never comes (to pick on a term from Erik Davies picked again from the High Weirdness by Mail catalogue), a jumble of vacous feelings of things liveliness or expenditure, changing natures that leave nothing unturned, including our dreams that seem to escape us & leave us stranded.

A prothean unforced becoming of outer and inner states, of moods like weather reports, or what recently in his last book Michael Taussig has termed Mastery of No-Mastery(MNM) or the ‘metamorphic sublime’. The people all around are changed without showing any significant changes on the surface, yet there is inexplicable things falling, while the representational bankrupcy is even more evident. Evidently Weather charts say nil about this. Climacteric scales have long tipped over and the rigorous and dire reports of the hottest year on record is falling on deaf ears each year, even if suffering and innumerable species (including human lives) are lost as each heat wave strikes. There is ample evidence yet there is also an inability and we seem ill equipped to gauge its full blown swipe.

Harshness does not exclude trembling atmospheric effects.

Air Conditioner starts almost in a pedantic way with a series of dictionary definition of Air, as flow as manner even as style and condition/conditioning – all of which seem to need redefinition according to new events, conditions and dysfunctionalities. Ie what the Global North bombastically deemed merely functional, highly competitive, adaptive and relentlessly improvable – turns out not to be. There is also a lack of ill intent, and the characters responses seem to always have some puzzled, semi-speculative understanding of this unusual situation. I said that this small movie does not claim planetary relevance, yet is speaks globally without shouting, directly murmuring.

It this the hum of the intelligent or sentient thermostats? Is it the dreams and longings of desperate attempts to repair what is un-repairable? You could blame anyone and find culprits, scapegoating is always on others, yet this does not lead anywhere. Or where it leads is one incredible meta-repair shop (not ‘charnel house of history’) – something that is both media museum, hacker lab etc Or a true semi derelict cyberpunk venue (not its Silicon Valley or maker space incarnation) where the mysteries of black-boxed technology don’t get just fixed but somehow scavenged and re-assembled in new and unsuspecting ensembles. Time travel might mean something completely different, it might mean to feel a gush of air, a fresh breath from a broken car AC or wash in the water condensed by all these ACs. The movie is local without being nativist, still it speaks in mysterious names, without explanation, yet it speaks to all – although the security guard is just a security guard, he is a sort of West African griot, a silent bard, a survivor scarred by wars of liberation of events that never get mentioned in the news and only obliquely adumbrated.

Somehow the ordering of events are all about violent interactions of people and objects or rather objects suicidal falling down to earth ground. A rain of suicidal ACs and dazed, always wary humans trying to disentangle and solve enigmas. Even if blaming the AC of ill intent, of exhaustion seems appropriate, one risks acting like a executor of the eternal boss command that just wants his AC back in good order and get on with the job. I cannot praise enough the wandering, meandering soundtrack which makes it even more of a contemporary desert of reality oasis.