A terrific debut. I have read a free sample of the book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. It is important for me to place Strange Labour within the vague contours of Eastern Europe for some reason. Eastern Europe, if such a thing exists, feels post-apocalyptic precisely in the sense that it does not fit with various standard post-apocalyptic tropes of existing SF. It feels like all the imaginings, fabulations, extrapolation of post-apocalypticism did not prepare us for this. Maybe in the same way that Laurie Penny wrote about the inability of ‘catastrophe porn’ or post-apocalyptic entertainment to prepare us for the new reality we are living at this moment.
The world-building – and this is not a building (but a world to be built?), is a work of Strange Labour that exposes us to the effects of abandonment, to the shadows of massive labyrinthine earthworks that suddenly ungrounded everything. I am maybe wrong but I feel there is a deep affinity with the outcome of rapid de-industrialisation, privatization, the dismantlement of welfare systems and abandonment of everything that happened after 1989 in Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Poland etc And I say this trying to avoid here the entire charge of Tarkovsky’s “The Zone”. The Zone appears as something immutable and thus zoned-off behind the specifics of a certain time and place, or even cordoned off by a particular historical chain-of-events. In a sense, Penner introduces us to something else, the dispersed drop-offs, the neurodivergent that cannot join the immense Stahanovist Çevengur voluntarism that has suddenly pushed the majority of humanity into a febrile and inescapable activity. Strange Labour has some affinity to most of what the best recent new weird (I am thinking about the works of VanderMeer – Borne, The Strange Bird) tells us – that definitely, something major happened, that it affected everything that came after, we just do not know exactly what. It does that without appealing to a biotechnologically-enabled posthuman frame, but at the same time, all the epileptics and the dementia nurses already inhabit that strange space. In a way, if we try and inhabit the world of Robert Penner it will not save us from disaster, it will maybe spurn us to appreciate its inchoate beauty and scavenge our own cosmology out of its shipwreck entrails. Such a world is not the wasteland of cannibals, murderous mutants and exotic dangers that most of post-apocalypticism abounds, but of care-work to be done, of temporary respite and mutual associations that do not settle into predictable patterns.
Somehow it makes us perceive the strangeness of that absent work. There is something else besides all the brutalist petroglyphs, cosmist mountain top sublime. Yes, the impossible monuments of Communist heyday – hold an almost intangible (for now) finality. At the same time, as a good friend wrote about The Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party on Buzludzha Peak such remains became very quickly quite alien, almost unintelligible, its purpose unknowable or aims completely and increasingly irrecoverable. These are just the most scenic ruins apt for majestic ruin porn tourism – but what about this labyrinthine goings-on? What about the various lives, the experiences of people who live amongst such ruins, en route towards something else? What about that something that is being slowly digested and is digesting these natural-industrial habitats. Environments and habitats are indissociable from an entirety that is not larger than its parts. Many have made a home there, masses of people that once called it a place of work, are now rambling, searching, almost shambling but there is incredible wayside beauty. It is enough there is an after – but this after – has fused so seamlessly with what came all of a sudden as to be unrecognizable.
Crystal Palace, Epcot Center, Mars space station all in one
It is not hard to be enthusiastic over Matt Wolfe’s new documentary. It also made me acutely aware that artistic works & investigations of biospherics or extra-terrestrial ecologies in their more outlandish, performative and experimental dimensions by Ralo Mayer might get forgotten or unduly overshadowed by the newer Spaceship Earth, big -budgeted more classical documentary formats.
studying the researchers
This being said, I think both Mayer’s unsettlements pioneering work and Matt Wolf’s more recent accomplishment are very important stations of closing the gap btw the current rise of collapse studies, Extinction Rebellion in the Anthropocene as well as establishing a counterpoint to the current capitalistic Star Settler exiters.
good times, thermos times & big mobile phones
Spaceship Earth is without a doubt one of the most honest and important appraisals of High Weirdness as defined by the Erik Davis in regard to our current situation, starting with the very practical things such as learning to live inside a closed system inside a closed (Earth) system and ending up sailing on a Spaceship of the Imagination while on indefinite quarantine.
oh, those banana sugar-free cakes keep on coming
Nevertheless I’ve got to mention a missing element. This powerful and complex all-American perspective ignores the earlier Soviet biospherian experiments called Bio-3 in Siberia that became an input for the new. Also very importantly, and missing from the 2020 Spaceship Earth documentary are the theoretical and popularizing work done by Soviet cosmist Vladimir Vernadsky, namely his 1926 The Biosphere book, considered by many oone of the founders of biogeochemistry, radiogeology and geochemistry, the first who defined ecology as the science of the biosphere. I completely understand the focus on West Coast/Frisco Haight-Ashbury scene, but still I miss the role played by Soviet experiments or how the closed system research and Bioregenerative Life Support studies plays out within the Soviet Space Program. I think this is to be regarded as a late-Soviet chapter of the biospherian saga, closing the strange loop of the earlier desert adobe architecture commune 70s work with the later – 80s 90s corporate, fully Bucky splendor, all via Siberia of all places.
sweet potatoes today sweet potatoes tomorrow
What I deem very important, and the docu makes sure of it is the performative, bricoleur attitude and avant-garde theater dimension, the way it synergetically feeds back (to take one of the keywords of the whole endeavor) with all the communal group practices. Their lofty ideals offer them a hands on experimence with designs and materials science approach. Maybe this also a true salvagepunk school of acting and thinking, in tune with current concerns and the need for recycling and trying out disparate things, new and old, low and high tech, China and Greece with ferrometal (their vessel has sails from Chinese junks and is called Heraclitus). This also brought stronger into focus what Hannah Arendt’s said in a 1970s interview after quoting René Char – “our inheritance is not guaranteed by any testament” to which she added “we are entirely free to help ourselves wherever we can from the experiences and thoughts of the past” (and future I would also add).
research vessel Heraclitus
Spaceship Earth does great service not only to the excommunicated founders (for the first time since Ralo Mayer work), but also to the rich brew of ideas, from the Tangiers scene of Burroughs & the desert beat generation retreat, as well to the whole gamut of such influences as René Daumal‘s Analogue Mountain(first published in 1952!), Manual for Spaceship Earth, Whole Earth Catalog etc
One can also understand the method behind it all as an Avant-Garde ecological collage, the garden of eden as Burrough cut up technique horticulture.
Biosphere 2. The ‘Biospherians’ pose for the camera during the final construction phase of the Biosphere 2 project in 1990. Left to right are: Mark Nelson, Linda Leigh, Taber MacCallum, Abigail Alling, Mark Van Thillo, Sally Silverstone, Roy Walford and Jayne Poynter. The 3.1 acre air- and water-tight building became their home for two years. Biosphere 2 was designed to allow study of human survival in a sealed ecosystem. The costs of this controversial, $150 million project were met from private funds. The Biosphere 2 project building is at Oracle, Arizona.
It is also a proof that heads and fists combine, both psychedelia and activists shared a common ground and a very applied outlook in this common space. All these iterations, incarnations and phases since the Theater of All Possibilities in 1967 up to the 70s The Synergia Ranch towards the current The Institute for Ecotechnics, the October Gallery in London are exemplary in this sense. One can question the Ed Bass family oil money connection – by all means, but this also pinpoints to the greater issue troubling current greening, greenwashing, ethanol/biofuels conundrum, as well as the fragility of this relationship with Big Business.
laid back John Allen back then
They had both very lofty, incredibly utopian, dreamy and long term thinking as well as very down to earth and experimental approach, the two do not exclude each other. Even the guru – John ‘Dolphin’ Allen is a creature from another era, more like a wide eyed Soviet Stakhanovite (стахановское) model worker, a strange engineer metallurgist & human potential coach. The gradual jump from adobe to boat making to geodesic architecture to cosmic ark and spacefaring civilization was one single strive for them. Also without reading his books or being able to asses his ideas (just dwl a paper on ecosphere & technosphere), I am somehow feeling my way trough a possible gnostic influence – especially when dealing with the eschaton, the ecospheric collapse etc Again the media talk about his apocalyptic vision seems to be spreading some sort of misinformation regarding his thoughts on that.
laid back John Allen now
The entrepreneurial aspect is also important, they have been also pioneering this startup dimension, in a sense they were one of the first and most advanced startups with all the trappings: angel investors, CEOs, public relations, financial officers, Wall Street Goldman-Sachs intrusion and final corporate raid. At the same time they, maybe also because of the performative aspect, because of their avant-garde roots or ecological de-growth orientation, have been cut loose out of the recent tech boom or Burning Man celebrations happening nearly at the same time in California. Spaceship Earth catches also the lack of – inin a key sequence when a group black students decries the whiteness of the biospherians andand their low or near absence of multiculturalism, while all the sampling is rather just biomes, the spectacle is very white future, as white as the 60s-70s commune seems to have been. I really enjoyed the short moment of a different speculation that did not play out in the 2 years of isolation & the provocation to think future as afrofuturist theatre inside the dome and what has to be remedied in this sense.
imagine waking up to this
In my view, even the spectacular – the media stunt aura actually saved them from joining a viable corporate environment, the one that gave rise to geek culture success. My thesis is thus that the sort of tekkie streamlining of stark minimalism that started to dominate both the
from above
Steve Job dogma + all the later incarnations was at odds with the zany, colorful, pantomime that united the Biospherian extended team and gave them an undeniable flair of late Blowup street comedians or low art Esalen members mixed with dessert greening of permaculture enthusiasts. They also embodied the spirit of Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. This aspect also probably contributed to their becoming easy prey to the media, a kind of naive but subversive theater play becoming just one show on the 57 channels and nothing on – post-spectacle reality TV machine, chewing them up and spiting them out. Hard to miss out the complete absence of screens, absence of touch screens, there’s only the glass – aquarium Vivarium dimension of it all. There is a lot to be said about Biospherian handshakes, touching the other trough glass, being in touch on the other side of the Zoo screen and being inaccessible in plain sight. The Pillar Artist project in 2019 Timișoara touches the same ground, of being accessible whilst at the same time isolated, in a public (closed) space exposed but out of reach.
hiding from the cameras in the welcoming thicket?
Somehow the peekaboo Wall Street Steve Banon boogeyman apparition coincides with the media tantrum about them being ‘fake’ or not scientific enough – all the tell tale signs of both tabloid press, climate change denial and post-truth. In fact with a high dose of cynicism one could say that once the public got over their novelty status, it became more important for the ratings to transform them into villains, fakers, cult members or plain old freaks. In a sense this shows also the limits of a Mars mission based on selling the exclusive rights to a future streaming of an on board soap opera as the means to sponsor the mission. To end on a good note, Spaceship Earth shows the all importance of dreaming as well as having a world wide experience, of nomadism as well as living under a desert dome, of actually being in touch with multiple realities around the globe or how this should inform whatever we want to achieve in outer space. Another big novum is switching the places with the researchers – now it’s fashionable in Natural History museum to watch trough a glass a bunch of paleontologists molding & casting dinosaur tracks, but Biosphere 2 was the first to allow such a direct peek into the theatre of scientific fact on a grand scale. The possibility to look at the experimenters while they did the experiments, to actually switch places, study the ones who do the studying.
Finally it also allowed for a credibly futuristic cosplay, of dressing up as your favorite Sci-fi show and getting away with it. Even when considering the incredible hardships in the midst of an eco-technosperic collapse living, it still permitted the incredible morning wake-up in the misty clouds of what comes magnificently close to an artificial atmosphere on another planet.
TimeSpace Warps 