spacetime coordinates: ?? / The film is set almost entirely on a space station orbiting the Ocean planet Solaris, adding flashbacks to the previous experiences of its main characters on Earth.
‘We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything – – solitude, hardship, exhaustion, death. We’re proud of outselves. But when you think about it, our enthusiasm’s a sham. We don’t want other worlds; we want mirrors.’
Trivia: One interesting fact is that the celebrated actor Romanian Iurie Darie plays the role of Commander (could not believe my eyes!). S The captain of the ship Laika was played by Piotr Pawlowski. Another characteristic of these movies was their diverse cast – in fact the cast was supposed to reflect a similarly diverse future as well as the realities on board the Interkosmos Soviet space program. So, Polish, East German, Romanian, Serbian and one Egyptian actress Soheir El Morshedy are part of the cast of this SF.
Here is some informationabout the Subharchord, an early electronic sound generator made in East Germany by Gerhard Steinke and used in TV shows, movie soundtracks etc for its futuristic, experimental feel.
And here a cool slide presentation about SF fandom in the GDR with lots of details, about authors, covers SF clubs and SF zine publishing stats.
The movies is generally criticized for its lack of philosophic vacuity or for lack of ideas in comparison with its much more celebrated predecessor 2001 directed by Kubrick (that in its turn got inspiration from Ikarie XB-1 directed by Czechoslovak Jindřich Polák). A strange signal from space arrives and Research Station Ikaros supposed to search for alien life forms, goes mysteriously silent around Jupiter. One strange characteristic is the general non-involvement in matters SF of either the film directors or script writers. There was a gap btw current SF writing in East and these movies, a thing that also sounds familiar with today’s situation when most of the new, exciting and interesting SF voices (with the notable exception of Liu Cixin or Jeff VanderMeer do not manage to see movie adaptations made from their literary oeuvres). For film directors it seems it was mainly just a chance tryout or even something dictated politically, although they had quite a free hand. Another characteristic was that gender equality was actively promoted and women scientists and pilots were treated on equal terms as the men. Architects in contrast, or set designers were much more enthusiastic and many of them probably, we might suppose SF fans that finally found an opportunity to exercise their talents, shape some alien planetary surfaces or spaceship designs.
logo of the Soviet Interkosmos which allow various member states of the Eastern bloc to send their cosmonauts to space
timespace coordinates: somewhere in the East Germany 1960s 1970s 1980s
Somehow I cannot embed the link so here it is (sadly only in German! and only available till 11.05.2022 ∙ 23:59). Many thanks to Julia Linda Schulze for catching on with this documentary and keeping us in the loop with it!
//This is, without question, one of the best documentaries I have seen about the context, ideals and cinematography surrounding East bloc, ex-Socialist SF. Maybe this is again a demonstration as why it is such a niche thing and why most of the older SF movies do not getting enough of an exposure and why it is easy to get stuck with images of mostly US, English-language movies from the same period (mainly space-age 1960s and 1970s). There is lots of interviewed researchers including film directors, special effects contributors, script writers, set designers, costume makers as well as SF historians, SF writers, art curators etc from current Germany that dwell on the retro-futuristic, the ideological engagements of the DDR period and the general openness towards a better and definitely more Internationalist and Pacifist, non-militarist future. The usual triumphalist scientist vision of unlimited growth and untrammeled progress that hounded so much of the Soviet planning is not really prominent, there is more questions and warnings as well as usual problems carried along in space. A few ideas first of what struck me when watching it. If you want to know more and see a few screen captures I made, here’s my take on it with the TW thread like rabbit hole into various related directions.//
Cosmonaut in the front is played by legendary Serbian actor Gojko Miticthat is known as the East German Winnetou in the Karl May Easterns (Ostern), as well as for his cosmonaut in 1970 DEFA studios Signale – Ein Weltraumabenteuer (Signals: A Space Adventure):
— I°I¦¦¦¦2021¦I¦¦¦|I I I I蟬鳴:¦¦|I°°|¦|I (@TironStefan) May 19, 2021
Although there is a lot of aesthetic appetite for the retro futuristic Former East, its communist monumental art, brutalism and mosaics, there are very few detailed popular accounts about how pop cult was the future or space exploration during the Cold War. In retrospect, we are left with an openly nostalgic (Ostalgie – how it is called somehow disparagingly in Germany) feeling, as well as a lot of, I guess, normal misunderstandings about a period mostly labeled as a broken dystopia, a period of cultural creative and artistic censorship. In the eyes of the aggressively individualistic and ‘free speech’, a transgressive present, it all seems uber-controlled, stiffing, with education and history suffering from propaganda, party and state- induced inaccuracies and biases. It is really to fixate on Stasi terror Cold War or ’empty idealism’ since there really existed a repressive state surveillance, human rights abuses etc These of course existed and nobody needs to deny them. Cringe is ok, even ridiculing, but then nihilism and cynicism are at the order at the day every day. It is harder and harder to entertain any kind of ideals, other than ‘futurism’ or singularity as dictated corporate leaders (Elon Musk or Bezos entrepreneur ‘genius’ types) CEOs and their overbearing visions of how the future should be shaped and in who’s image. Promethean – ‘besting and bending nature’ to our will is clearly not the way, yet common will and reason must still have to weigh in if we are to somehow mitigate what mostly Western ‘growth’ has already done to the planet. Thus, under critical and trying times, it is becomes hard to acknowledge there was a playful side, a dreamy side and one that considered cooperation and pacifism as the precondition for space exploration, or avoiding the worst of the worst here on Earth. Visions of the East bloc Utopia are not a bloc, and are naive in any way, they are informed by a certain scientifically-informed outlook, of changing emotions and hopes in regard to the progressive fragility of modern human civilization as a whole, at a particular juncture, a difficult turning point characterized by that very modern separation of the ‘space of experience’ from the ‘horizon of expectation’ (highlighted in the work of German historian of Enlightenment and Modernity Reinhart Koselleck, especially his Futures Past). Our whole collective experience as an entire species, one might say of humanity as a whole, has not prepared us for what is around the corner, the existential risks around the next bend. This might mean unprecedented space exploration, material improvements, a more egalitarian space living, unusual and unsuspected medical & technological amenities, as well as the incredible and unprecedented material and ecological threats, that none of our ancestors experiences or current experiences can prep us for what’s coming. These split, the split between the lived and accumulated experience of previous generation and what lies ahead was particularly prominent in the XX East bloc, ex-Socialist, ex-Communist -call them what u want countries and political systems. This dissociation of the future from both present and the past – has, I think also characterized and formed these anxieties and hopes that animate and infuse these East German movies.
While the above cannot be ruled out, there is the exactly opposite feeling that experience, however slight and remote, back here on earth, can somehow introduce us to somehow that is beyond immediate reach, transforming us here on earth trough mutual communal play. That we, as communal playful primates can practice and the enjoy is essential in a period of tremendous technological & scientific changes. This happens whenever we have to face the future together. Yes technological and scientific overdrive – was popular in Soviet east, heavy ‘Taylorist’ industrialization started with Lenin, Chernobyl events immediately followed suit, catching up with the West and war against nature made sure the collapse came earlier than planned, but ecological and environmental (as well as what we would call X-Risk) thinking was also making strides. Especially during the long 1980s, the last gasp of those divergent regimes was reworked and visible in SF bookd amd movies. Some Socialist SF movies already started showing the dirty side of things, moving away from the totalizing ‘Star Trek’ futures, acknowledging there is pollution, there’s a visible tear & wear of progress and technological betterment, and the fact that the post-apocalyptic times or xenoplanetary worlds might be quite un-heroic, with ego-maniacal rulers, neo colobialism, and various forms of slavery, racism and sexism still very much alive. Even as a space faring civilisation you still had to recharge a spaceship’s hyperdrive from (sic!) – proto-technological remains such as a pair or phosphorus smeared matchsticks (like in Soviet Kin-Dza-Dza 1986). This planetary future was to be experienced, not just dreamed or read about in SF books, and one that cannot be faced as nations nor as corporate entities, not even as people or as a single species, nor race, gender, sex, origin and birth – should be made a priority. This universalist call it what u want – program, grand plan, vision, dream, etc has been a motor for a lot of very unlikely cosmic visions, from the Pioneer playgrounds, school visits, children’s books, TV programs etc. This was a practice foremost – of imaginary exercises in schools, during classes, in kindergartens, when one had to write and think in terms of the year 2000, write an essay about what one would do or one’s children would do in that incoming future! Everything was suffused (at certain periods more than others for sure) with the livable qualities of this kind of starry eye program, the idea that you can participate via present into a future. That you or your group of school friends are some small part of something much more grandiose that makes even the usually drab, scarcity prone and usually defective Socialist present livable. It was almost the runaway- dreaming of the weirdo Russian cosmists (Tsyolkovsky, Fyodorov etc) and shameless avantgarde lofty ideals but turned into something more humble, more terrestrial, (DIT) DoItTogether in a way that was not deffered (no waiting!), but constantly living it and experiencing it in the Now. There is a lot of nostalgia industry nowadays, although noirish 1940 nostalgia adds a different layering to – and makes retrowave cyberpunk post-Marxist itself divergent, diverging further more from a complacent belief in unlimited progress as such. Marvel is peddling tons of nostalgia, just thinking about WW84 or Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, yet calls about “retrofuturism” obscure the fact that what we are properly speaking about is not a nostalgia about something gone, something used up, but for the future – of valuing not just what was or is, but what could have been; those unrealized (maybe even more and more unachievable at the present moment) potentialities that coexist and suffuse what has happened or happening. What they lacked in action, plotline or even cerebrality, or the usual Kaboom competitive strife & big Star Wars fireworks, these Eastern SF flicks provided a vague, general background, a substrate on which a programmatically (much too rosy &) hopeful, universalist (in spite of everything – colonialism, imperialism, racism, instrumental reason, carbon ideology, patriarchy etc) belief that one can skip exotic bananas (as one of the SF writers in the movie reminisces), in order to entertain the possibility of contributing to exoplanetary adventures. At the same time, this strain of SF was not good at dealing with the past, especially the East German past during the WWII, or the way a recent past as much as an older past still lingers or may affect present outcomes and futural imaginings. Still, what Utopia in Babelsberg Studios manages to evaluate or value is that is is possible to approach such imaginings without fetishizing them. We are mostly thinking about Hollywood as the preeminent dream machine, even now in the rise of China Hollywoods seem to bend and become reinvested in the Chinese Dream. This makes me(and probably others) curious, since, like Frankfurter School cultural pessimism always maintained, Hollywood is too much real and not very much dreaming. It was never about dreaming, but about repeatedly selling the same waking nightmares or recycled capitalist tropes as realities in the form of dreams.
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives–where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance–are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules. But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination–propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process.
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit–at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.
With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future–if we let it.
A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right.
In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right.
Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it’s just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can’t pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.
timespace coordinates:Æon Flux (imdb) is set in a surrealGerman Expressionist style futuristic universe of the year 7698 AD. Æon Flux is comprised of a bizarre post-apocalypticdystopianworld of a barren wasteland, mutant creatures, clones, and robots within the last two border wall cities of Monica and Bregna (similar to the Berlin wall) somewhere in former Eastern Europe after an environmental catastrophe occured that wiped out 99 percent of the global population. The title character is a tall, sexy, dominatrix scantily-clad secret agent from the city of Monica, skilled in espionage, assassination and acrobatics. Her mission is to infiltrate the strongholds of the city of Bregna, which is led by her sworn enemy, and sometimes lover, Trevor Goodchild, the technocraticdictator of Bregna. The two sister cities engage in a futile never ending war for ideological supremacy; while Monica represents a dynamic nihilisticanarchist society where rules don’t exist, Bregna embodies a centralized scientific planned Orwellianpolice state. The names of their respective characters reflect this: Flux as the self-directedagent from Monica and Goodchild as the self-appointedleader of Bregna.
The term Æon comes from the Gnostic notion of Æons as emanations of the God, who come in male/female pairs (here Flux and Goodchild).
Æon Flux/ˌiːɒnˈflʌks/ is an American avant-garde science fiction animated television series that aired on MTV from November 30, 1991 until October 10, 1995, with film, comic book, and video game adaptations following thereafter. It premiered on MTV’s Liquid Television experimental animation show, as a six-part serial of short films, followed in 1992 by five individual short episodes. In 1995, a season of ten half-hour episodes aired as a stand-alone series. Æon Flux was created by American animator Peter Chung. Each Episode plots have elements of social science fiction, biopunk, allegory, dystopian fiction, spy fiction, psychological drama, postmodern visual, psychedelic imagery and Gnostic symbolism.
timespace coordinates: In 2011, a deadly pathogenic virus has killed 99% of the Earth’s population, forcing the survivors to regroup and scatter across the Earth. 404 years later, in late 2415, all of the survivors inhabit Bregna, a dystopian walled futuristic city-state, which is ruled by a congress of scientists.
The live-action movie Æon Flux(imdb), loosely based upon the series and starring Charlize Theron, was released in theaters on December 2, 2005, preceded in November of that year by a tie-in video game of the same name(Gameplay) based mostly on the movie but containing some elements of the original TV series. (wiki)
Eric Faden is an Associate Professor of Film/Media Studies at Bucknell University. His research has appeared in Early Popular Visual Culture, Strategies, Convergence, The Journal of Film and Video plus the anthologies Arrêt Sur Image and The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies. Faden also creates videographic works that explore how scholarly research might appear as visual media. These experimental films are distributed commercially (Third World Newsreel, Media Education Foundation), published in on-line journals (Vectors, Mediascape, The Cine-Files, and [in]Transition), and screen internationally (The Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania and the Contemporary Culture Center in Montpellier, France).
In January of this year, Saudi Arabia announced an immense new development project, that is supposed to set a blueprint for the future of the country and the world. The country will build a city, that stretches along a single 100 mile long line
TimeSpace Warps 