We commissioned Cristian Dragan to make an extended video essay about the patchy history of Romanian science fiction cinema in the frame of the New TEMPOrealities: Xenogeneses of SF in the Scena 9 BRD Bucharest spanning from early examples to various shorts, unfinished or hard to find rarities. It is probably a first of its kind.
Sorry for the long post – PNEA just pointed out that the majority of our readers is non-Romanian speaking. Well, below there is an introduction – the exhibition statement in English, maybe a bit abstract but I think it sets the mood for the show. The show itself is has various elements including and Out Of Place artefact discovered in Romania during the 1970s that I got enamored during my youth. It is the so-called Robot Foot from Aiud and was initially dated as being 300.000 yr old being due to the way it was found next to some wooly rhino fossil bones. It was sent to be dated at both the Atomic Energy Institute in Magurele Romania and somewhere in Switzerland and the analysis came as being mostly aluminum. Well, this is one of the those anachronic object that can disturb the smooth succession of the time-space continuum, so we took it as the centerpiece for the show and the logo. We also had a special alien script font developed by Alexandru Pisica Patrata Ciubatariu. We also included a lot of SF zines, we did an entire collage of them with the whole panorama of various publications, DIY zines, SF comics, all produced during the Socialist era and after 1989. We wanted to highlight the diversity and the richness of expression to be found in the SF fandom in Romania in particular, but for the whole East bloc in general. We had a famous documentary by Andrei Ujica included in the show about the last citizen of the Soviet Union, left in space during the days of the collapse of the CCCP. There is much to be talked about – hopefully we will have soon an article by Paula Erizeanu in Calvert Journal in EN about the show. For now here is the statement:
New Temporealities: The Xenogeneses of SF
The objective of „The Xenogeneses of SF” exhibition is to explore novel non-linear temporalities by proposing an imagination exercise in time about time. It is an open invitation to traverse various timelines of newly imagined histories, brimming with speculative worlds. We can imagine and explore together the modalities and material conditions that allowed such worlds to thrive, multiply, support each other, become permanent and eventually get ruined.
We will partially try and follow such aspirations, consequences, deviations, specific to the Sci-Fi phenomenon, while highlighting accumulated side-effects that tend to spill over well beyond such speculative world building sites.
We will invite you to have a deeper look at the role of Sci-Fi, outside of its solely anticipatory or predictive function, as a method of un-predicting, of dis-anticipating and non-actualizing. At the limit, SF takes as a given the fact that exteriority permeates the now and the here.
This exhibition probes something else as well, acknowledging that the known is never fully known, ordinary or matter-of-fact, if we start question the very inevitability of our current world via a specific pop inflected situational SF. It argues that the most banal reality is already an extraterrestrial one, arrived from elsewhere, distorted and ready to be revisited by a SF intensely animated by varieties of never-ever, of nowhere and not yet. We intend to open up a portal or several portals that mediate these two aspects of SF.
The improbability of these worlds may be only improbable and unimaginable under the current circumstance or from the perspective of current scientific consensus, or it can take this state of things as a starting point and push it towards its outermost consequences.
We want to gather such speculative worlds that are made impossible under current economic, technological and social conditions. A techno-scientific worldview that is largely dissociated from the common good and severely hampered by economic and political imperatives as well as having to face unprecedented planetary, climacteric and ecological challenges. A worldview that has been always been co-dependent and constrained in its scope and vision.
The exhibition presents various dynamics and trajectories that have started from the initial SF core communities, from a primary SF fandom, but never remained there, becoming a common concern to us all.
The SF fandom is most probably the oldest organized fandom in Romania and other East European countries, and should be understood as a polymorphic encounter of common interests and transformative passions, clusters of fans, amateurs, artists, engineers,cenaclu club members, game designers, VFX artists, all spread out in time, all speculatively engaged in a imaginative effort and multifarious group-play. Involved in exchanging collective worlds that have well since crossed over beyond their initial place of origin and elaboration.
We start from the idea that wherever you are, even in the most isolated imaginable place, the very extremity of today’s contemporary world will carry you straight into SF, with third kind encounters at every step. We consider that our current reality is closely innervated by these vectors of SF, especially if we just consider those very ways in which SF might help us think and solve unsolvable contradictions, while living and inhabiting in the churn of irreversible mutations that were never tailor-made for us.
Below is a recent interview we gave as a joint curatorial crew to the IQadds online mag.
Practic am luat copypaste de pe site-ul IQads. Dacă se sesizează dăm jos, însă pe de alta parte nu am semnat cu ei nici un contract si aproape toata informatia furnizată aici, în afara strict de intrebarile trimise initial e de la noi, furnizată de mine si Vasile Leac si legată de expoziţia Timpuri Noi. Afland ca miscarea lor e sa fie free câteva zile, dupa care intra dupa paywall, m-am gandit sa salvez aci si sa ramana accesibil mai mult timp. Plus erau nevoie si de niste hyperlinks.
E cumva tipic pentru zilele astea – tu faci research, tu strangi informatii, trimiti raspunsul si la sfârsit ajungi sa platesti pentru propria ta informatie pentru ca e detinuta de platformele altora :)) care au backup juridic etc intorc pe degete legea drepturilor intelectuale etc. Poate gresesc, poate nu, chiar aş vrea să greşesc… Dar Aaron Swartz saracu stia mai bine lucrurile astea.
În acel moment s-a coagulat, în momentul în care unele scriitoare de SF au remarcat că nimic din filmele SF nu ne-au pregătit pentru ce se întâmplă și că de fapt nu era nevoie de bărbăţi brutali mînjiţi cu motorină, ci mai curând de îngrijitori, îngrijitoare transpiraţi și disperaţi, o forţă de muncă supra solicitată şi lipsită de mijloace, povestesc ei.
Este o expoziţie despre timp, care necesită timp. Cum a luat ea formă explică mai bine în rândurile de mai jos Ștefan Tiron și Vasile Leac. Cei doi vorbesc despre viitorul amanetat, speranțe colective, cum spune SF-ul istoria din România, dar și despre Alien și Dune, Colectia Romanelor SF scoasă de Univers sau amintiri cu oseminte imaginare de giganți din anii 80.
Prima întâlnire cu SF-ul
E greu cu primele – tind să zic că e vorba de lucruri transmise, mediate de altcineva și de altceva. Un punct important – notat ca atare în expozitie, când am folosit SF în titlul ei, am păstrat ambiguitatea dintre termenii ficţiune speculativa (speculative fiction) și science fiction (ambele prescurtate ca SF) care e doar un subset am putea zice din prima.
Una din cele mai pregnante amintiri este filmulAlien de Ridley Scott (1979) povestit înainte să fie văzut de către tatăl unui prieten care fusese în SUA și văzuse acolo filmul în perioada când nu era accesibil la noi. Trebuia să-ți imaginezi totul fără imagini, fără referinţe, exact ca în piesa radiofonicăExpediţie în Crocobauritania (1984), inclusă în expoziţia asta.
Deci tot, inclusiv mediul de pe navă, inclusiv fiinţa aia care îţi ieşea din piept afară şi avea acid în loc de sânge. Apoi importante au fost desigur ecranizărările astea după Lem și Fraţii Strugatski de Tarkovski pe muzică de Eduard Artemiev (chiar dacă autorul Stanislav Lem nu prea era mulţumit), important e de reţinut că e vorba de un SF est-vestic, includ aici și Futureworld (1976), văzut la Favorit și Soylent Green tot din același an, vizionat în anii 1980.
Unul dintre noi a descoperit SF-ul în complet alt context, săpând împreună cu fratele său într-un deal prin anii 85, încercând să dezgroape oseminte de giganţi, cum se zvonea pe atunci, mai în glumă mai în serios, că stau îngropate într-un tumulus din apropierea satului unde a copilărit.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului, postere proiect Laika se intoarce. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Referințe personale și riscul unui joc plicticos
Aș răspunde cumva în raport cu expoziţia curatoriată, căci este foarte uşor să alunecăm pe panta personalului, şi am încercat cât putem să ne ferim de o perspectivă din asta personală, chiar dacă e imposibil să eviţi parcursul individual poţi să încerci asta. Importante au fost în acest sens şi texte teoretice şi critice începând cu Darko Suvin, Florin Manolescu şi Frederic Jameson, şi continuând cuSeo-Young J. Chu, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Mircea Opriţă,Steven ShavirosauSherryl Vint.
Înscriindu-ne într-o largă zonă de studii SF am mers mai mult pe trans-personal și colectiv, căci SF-ul ca fenomen nu credem că poate fi detaşat de aceste legături, sinteze, medii și relaţii sociale uneori aiurizante. Punct important e ultimul an de liceu 1994, petrecut în Alaska la Steller High School când un coleg a organizat o seară de anime unde au rulat Gundam și Akira.
Cred că e mult prea ușor să arunci cu referinţe în dreapta şi în stânga, impunând o referenţialitate geek arogantă de insider, care buclează și nu face decât să confirme lucruri deja aparent para-ştiute și canonizate. Totul riscă astfel să devină joc plicticos de băieţei și rachetuţele lor (şi poate asta și e).
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Planuri si patente OSIM de obiecte zburatoare,OZN din comuna Perişor (Dolj). Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Asta fiind zise, pe lângă turnanta publicaţiilor Nemira din anii 1990, importantă a fost lumea eminamente vizuală a comics-urilor, pe partea de bandă desenată cu subiecte SF, mai ales metamorfoza Image Comics de după 2012, dacă nu greşesc, cu Prophet no 21, apoi mai vechi, binenţeles Incal de la Metal Hurlant, iar pe partea japoneză tot ce a făcut Masamune Shirow, Katsuhiro Otomo (inclusiv chestii mai puțin cunoscute precum Domu, The Legend of Mother Sarah etc) și mai ales Tsutomu Nihei cu Blame!, Biomega etc. în jurul lui 2000.
Nu mai menționez aici diferite anime și filme pt că nu ne ajunge interviul ăsta. Înainte de 1989, tind să menționez numerele revistei ORION, publicată la Craiova în format mare cu benzi desenate pe ultima pagină de neîntrecutul Victor Pîrligras (Mutanţii se chemă parcă și era o bandă desenată serializată), în două culori (negru, roşu, parcă) care îl cumpăram de la chioşcul de ziare și căruia i-am oferit un loc special în expoziţie.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Print dupa desen original de Walter Riess coperta la Almanah Anticipatia. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Dacă viitorul poate fi amanetat
Importantă în acestă expoziţie considerăm că este și a doua funcție – cea propriu zis speculativă a SF-ului, una care nu e neapărat viitorologică, de predicţie, cât cea de anti-predicţie, cea care nu lasă cele mai negre predicţii, deja operative, deja parte din strategiile militare și privat-corporate să fie singura variantă de posibil. Deci vedem toate mecanismele de anticipare azi ca fiind extrem de problematice, în măsura în care însăşi viitorul educativ așa cum e el jalonat de Venture Capital (în viitoarea ta carieră, să zicem) aproape că buclează şi activează ceea ce prezice.
Astea fiind spuse, merită repetat din când în când – că noul în capitalismul global este mai multe feluri de la fel. Dacă viitorul poate fi amanetat ca risc calculabil, el este eminamente vandabil şi profitabil, când nu nu, chiar şi în măsura în care aproape toate generaţiile ulterioare (cu Greta în frunte și o bună parte din populaţia planetei) și-au dat seama că au fost excluşi din propriul lor viitor. Fie ei sunt înhămaţi la datorii şi rate de plată care nici în milioane (de ani?) și generaţii întregi viitoare nu vor putea fi plătite. Fie tot ei, generaţia asta doomer-ilor, au realizat că generaţia precedentă, cea cinică a părinţilor, care este şi generaţia celor care deţin mijloacele de producţie de pe Terra și conturi neimpozabile, nu vor face nimic ca să preîntâmpine catastrofa climaterică care va afecta viitorul celor mai mulţi dintre urmaşii noştri. Pentru asta a curs destulă cerneală deja în romane și antologii de climate-fiction recente care nici nu mai sună a SF pentru că deja vedem cu ochii noştrii ce se întâmplă.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Synth si tape loops de Mitos Micleusean. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Ce spune SF-ul românesc despre istoria românească
O foarte bună întrebare, şi aș vrea să răspund la întrebarea asta cu o imagine foarte importantă de pe coperta 4 a revistei ORION nr 3 din 1989, cu un desen făcut de Victor Pîrligras semnat ca fiind din 1983, aflat în studioul SFTV din expoziţie.
issue of the ORION SF zine first published at the end of the 1980s in Craiova by the local Theatre. It was one of the most important and lavish Romanian SF zines offering comics, SF studies criticism, both translations and original works of science fiction literature all in one.
Las pe cele și cei interesaţi să caute să răspundă şi să discute acest desen. Pot da aici un spoiler și spune că este un desen extrem de puternic, ca o gravură alb negru, cu un personaj imobil care cerşeşte. E vroba de un cyborg sau un robot umanoid care stă la marginea străzii cu capul picat, deşurubat din umeri. Este un robot omul străzii, un clochard robotic, sărăcit și aparent abandonat de sistemul social şi sistemul de producţie care l-a creat.
Nu vreau să dăm prea multe hint-uri în acest sens, important e că el arată spre social și spre societate sau lipsa de social în post 1989, şi într-un fel constuie una din cele mai puternice și vizionare, chiar dacă stranii și neliniştitoare mărturii ale SF-ului și societăţii romanâneşti postdecembriste. Ba chiar am putea adăuga globale, sub spectrul unei post-automatizări inegale care nu îndeplineşte promisiunile post-muncii și unde orele de muncă cresc și salariile scad. Un loc unde majoritatea joburilor sunt parte dintr-un gig economy, unde ajungi să dai la pedală fără nici un fel de drepturi şi unde majoritatea nu își mai permit asigurări de sănătate (depanare!) și unde atât roboţii cât și oamenii sunt tratataţi ca fiind obsolescenţi.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Povestea expoziției
Procesul ei a fost visare, și apoi muncă și iarăşi muncă.
Ea a început poate în copilărie dar s-a conturat acum 2 ani, înainte de pandemie, în momentul în care toată lumea în plină pandemie începea să zică, trăim vremuri SF, totul e SF. Deci în acel moment s-a coagulat ea, în momentul în care unele scriitoare de SF au remarcat că nimic din filmele SF nu ne-au pregătit pentru ce se întâmplă și că de fapt nu era nevoie de bărbăţi brutali mînjiţi cu motorină ci mai curând de îngrijitori, îngrijitoare transpiraţi și disperaţi, o forţă de muncă supra solicitată şi lipsită de mijloace. E vorba de SF-ul aşa ziselor servicii esenţiale, de cele mai periclictate joburi invizibile, ale oamenilor de sacrificiu de pe altarul economiei.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. SFTV #1 -show cu Irina Gheorghe
Pregătirea a constat în multe intâlniri și contacte directe sau la distanţă cu participanţi, susţinătoare şi susţinatori. Nici nu ştim de unde să începem. Că e vorba de vizită de lucru la Muzeul Henri Coandă la localitatea Perişor (Dolj) la OZN-ul montat în faţă de ing. Nicolae Stăncioiu în 2015 şi până la contactul cu cinemateca germană și RBB pentru obţinerea drepturilor de difuzare a documentarului Utopie în Babelsberg despre SF-ul est german cu ajutorul Institutului Goethe. Întâlnirea de la Avanpost în Bucureşti, studio de efecte speciale de sunet, cu sound designer-ul Marius Lefterache care a lucrat la SF-ul Blood Machines.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Am putea spune că ăsta e un alt SF de azi, munca asta de colaborare și susţinere din toate părţile care a devenit imposibilă și greu de conceput.
Inclusiv subtitrat și tradus aceste materiale cu ajutor de unde s-a putut. Am avut sugestii de parcurs cum a fost Out of the Present despre ultimul cetăţean al Uniunii Sovietice rămas în spaţiu abandonat de cei de la sol, documentar de Andrei Ujica, pe care l-am inclus la sugestia Andreianei Mihail. Apoi contactarea grupului de aeronautică prezent în expozitie cu macheta care o vor lansa cât de curând în spăţiu, în Portugalia. Nu mai menționez munca la infografice cu filogeneza și taxonomia meme-lor cu extratereştri, aceasta din urmă realizată de cei de la Trepantsii sau de harta migraţiilor X aliene făcută de Alin Răuţoiu, sau de harta incompletă a cenaclurilor SF facută de Suzana Dan la indicaţiile noastre şi de cronologia (vădit şi ea incompletă) a contactelor extraterestre din Ţarile Române făcută cu ajutorul istoricului Cătălin Ghercioiu.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
S-au putem vorbi despre video eseul Ad Astra Per Aspera făcut de Cristian Drăgan comisionat special pentru acest show, o primă trecere în revistă a istoriei filmului de SF românesc. Sau poate arhivele de reviste şi fanzine sau poveștile de cenaclu SF ale lui Alexandru Ciubotariu, munca de selecţie și xeroxare a acestor materiale.
Sau poate cărţile donate de Ambasada Chinei despre robotica chineză sau Istoria ştiinţei și tehnologiei din China, din trecut până în prezent, misiuni spaţiale chinezeşti şi contactul fructuos avut cu ei în acest sens şi în scopul evidenţierii unei explorări pacifice și non militariste a spaţiului cosmic.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Premisele
Două lucruri care nu cred că decurg din textele aferente expoziţiei şi ar merita menţionate, anume faptul că asociaţia Ephemair – conţine termenul de air, aer, văzduh și că la origini, din câte ştim era visul unui festival dedicat aerului, dedicat baloanelor și diferitelor modalităţi de a pluti și explora văzduhul. Poate nici ei nu ştiu asta, dar asta a fost un posibil punct de decolare, pt ca să nu uităm că primele pioniere și pionieri ai vazduhului, înainte de avioane și de nave au fost cei care au mers în dirijabile, baloane, deci astronautica și explorarea cosmosului este anticipată de etapa baloanelor plutitoare umplute cu aer.
Altă sursă importantă ascunsă o consider ideea lui Miklos Szilard care a și curatoriat împreună cu Mircea Nicolae un show la Rezidenta BRD Scena 9 despre Matthis-Teutsch, la rândul lui o punte interesantă dintre avangarda clasică și viitorologie de tip realism constructiv (cum o numea Teutsch). Szilard zicea mai în glumă mai în serios că dacă nu ar fi făcut expo cu Teutsch ar fi făcut un call pentru o navă spaţială construită de free lanceri ca să le trezească conştiinţa de clasă.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
O expoziție despre timp care are nevoie de timp
Repet, cel mai important este să o vadă şi să îsi lase timp pentru ea, căci este o expoziţie şi despre timp… care necesită timp. Tangenţial este și despre schimbarea percepţiei referitoare la timp, la timpul rămas dacă a mai rămas, şi despre o temporalitate nouă, specifică banilor și lichidităţii capitalului, am putea zice, cum precizează un text important semnat de Bogdan Popaîn ziarul expoziţiei de Centrul Dialectic și alăturat lucrării lor Bani Gheaţă, instalată în camera 5.
Altfel putem ruga publicul să nu se aștepte la o expoziţie care arhivează sau face o arheologie a fenomenului SF, ci una care se vrea speculativă ca atare, care lucrează chestionând cu mijloacele specifice SF-ului, starea de fapt actuală. Nu are sens să predicăm sau să pretindem o expertiză în acest sens, ci mai curând să oferim publicului și neiniţiatilor o cale de acces, îndemnându-i să îsi compună și construiască împreună o expertiză într-un domeniu vast, cu milioane de publicaţii și expresii.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Trebuie să fim critici dar nu condescendenţi faţă de modul în care alţii îşi imaginau viitorul, şi mai important e să vedem care sunt constrângerile azi, de ce nu ne mai putem azi imagina anumite lucruri.
În cuvintele lui Quentin Skinner, nu e cazul să căutăm superioritatea imaginarului actual faţă de ce și-a imaginat umanitatea în timp şi față de aşa zisele naivităţi de altă dată, ci mai curând să vedem „ce constrângeri invizibile și nerecunoscute plasează societatea noastră asupra capacităţii noastre de a imagina” o altfel de lume am adăuga noi.
E nevoie de pozitivism pesimist
Haideţi să trecem rapid peste ultimele doua produse mari și somptuoase ale acestui an, Dune de Villeneuve, și Fundaţia produsă de Apple+. NU sunt pe lista de favorite, şi de aceea vrem şi noi să vedem alte lucruri decât clasici de acum 60 de ani, pentru că există o puzderie de romane SF fenomenale, la care nu mai ajungem din cauza marilor epopei din trecut care culeg toată atenţia şi bugetele. Mă refer aici la revoluția genului SF de operă spaţială – că e vorba de Elizabeth Bear, Iain M Banks, Peter Watts, Cixin Liu, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Kamerun Hurley, Tade Thompson, Nicky Drayden etc.
Aș putea spune că invariabil astăzi e nevoie de un anume pozitivism pesimist, adică pesimism în gândire, optimism în acţiune, un pic altceva decât pozitivismul logic, filozofia care s-a dorit hegemonică în ce priveşte ştiinţa. Atunci când avem de-a face cu ceva implicabil, ştiind ce ne aşteaptă în următoarul secol, SF-ul ne trafichează cu generozitate instrumente care ne situează în inima unor procese care par că ne depăşesc capacitatea de acţiune, gândire și simţire, făncându-ne părtăşi la o lume mai mare, şi participanţi în tot ce se întâmplă, până şi în felul sau tipul de SF pe care vom decide să îl actualizăm în comun.
Predicţia o situez tot ca o anti-predicţie pentru 2071, aș vrea să avem un Minister Întru Viitor cum sună titlul cărţii lui Kim Stanley Robinson, însă fără 30 de milioane de morți datorate unui val de căldură din ce ce în ce mai puternic situat în viitorul apropiat, asta dacă se poate.
Everyone regularly reading this blog knows that pnea is the gamer and explorer of these virtual worlds. I have very very low gaming skills, experience and knowledge relating to these spaces, the way devs make assemble and construct these games. So I am always grateful when someone is guiding me via their vast experience, POW, hard-gained wisdom. One can is hard pressed to at least try inhabit subjectivities and even worlds this way without ignoring the fact that one is led, guided. These videos by Super Bunnyhop are a revelation in that particular sense. Thanks to Alin Rautoiu I came across them, and well, I think they somehow managed to give me another kick and start making appreciate more the variety of games out there, or the shifts that animate game development. Probably these are not only some of my favorite gamers videos but YT youtuber videos per se in general! Videos and games that cross easily over into astronomy, anthropology or climatology, with various critical insights that do not diminish but enhance our constant delight. I love to be introduced this way to larger things.
This one is about an indigenous game called Umurangi Generation inspired by NGE. The game takes the whole fury about our current world, about the feeling of a lack of agency and the way everything gets subsumed under capitalism, transforming a shooter into a camera shooting exercise of journalistic proportions where the maori- developer included several ‘alien’ invasions, one worse than the last. But this is only the teaser towards a really a romp through the recent switch from UFO to UAP terminology and the way Pentagon and US conservatives such as Rubio are framing the narrative in regards to these recently released videos branding them as “threats”. There is not just a inkling of militarism and a possible investment incentive to up the ante of the military-industrial complex whenever such unexplained are branded as “threats”.
Invasions are a particular keyword favorite of mine – and there is always some reverse victimization involved. The invader is almost always – feeling invaded, very rarely acknowledging how our world has been shaped by migration routes or brutal gunboat colonialism. The European white male human, even if we take let us say Bram Stoker’s 1890s Dracula as the most obvious example – has deemed the immigrant from Eastern Europe as disease ridden and ‘foreign’, and a vampiric threat to women. My particular focus is about how biological invasions or what we call invasive species, tends to paste over these ravages of colonial and global capitalist histories, the way plants or animals were introduced, or have escaped introduction into new areas, new lands. This index of human ‘invasiveness’ – is a darling of the far right, and almost all current ethnopolitcs of the “the long counter-revolution” (in McKenzie Wark‘s terms) tends to collate dehumanizing, invasive swarming attributes to the immigrants coming from war-torn and climate crises affected areas. When this happens, most of the invasiveness of the Western powers and destabilizing economic effects are being muffled or skipped. Radical UFOlogy (in the sene of Dante Minazolli or MIR Men in Red collective) acts like a counter-strategy, declassifying such attempts at weaponzing and militarizing contact with other civilizations. It is very important to also see how first contact as cargo cults lies at the core of paleoastronautic contact narratives or how ‘advanced civilization’ is equated with a Western history steeped in exploitation of resources and the enslavement of others.
The colonial ghosts, they are not ghosts and not far away, since indigenous resistance is still at the forefront of resisting big oil and the depredation of capitalism. Extraterrestrial or exobiological that does not take this into account will end up on the poor side of an imagination that sees everything in terms of outside danger, alien invasions or colonizing ancient aliens. Most of the time we are the threat, and so any future contact with Mars will have to abide to Antarctica type of no-contact measures or even more stricter. Even as Bunnyhop mentions, discussions about parietal Aborigine art from Australia that presumably registers such paleo contact tend to ignore the way contact with the recent past white ‘alien’ invaders wielding foreign technologies also got registered. Since its inception science fiction’s emergence as a modern genre remains unthinkable outside the history of colonization and exploitation (see John Rieder) of others by European powers. Afrofuturism is at the forefront taking this history of slavery and exploitation and remaking it into something else, and of terming UFO abductions precisely in terms of slaveship Atlatic Trade abductions. It is easy to forget the way ‘colonization’ and space colonization tends to overlap for that matter or the terrestrial way we imagine aliens as alien ‘races’. Any alienism has to deal with the subjugation of others, their annihilation and continuous othering, including the was this history gets transmitted and communicated and how such occupation traumas are still around us and determine the “uneven development”, to use Marx’s words. Thus the histories of this planet are with us whenever we imagine us imponderable during flights of space exploration or the most recent trends of privatization of space travel. It is always helps going back to H G Wells War of the Worlds and the way it was critical on British Imperialism and Victorian racial hierarchies. Don’t want to overlap more with the incredible introduction to the Umurangi game, developed by a maori about kids that basically witness and document the depredation of their worlds.
And there is more to come – including Gamifiying Global Warming or doing the math and Newtonian physics for the whole of the solar system in a game or how one can be walk in the footsteps of your primate predecessors.
Two space hunters are tracking down a machine trying to free itself. After taking it down, they witness a mystical phenomenon: the ghost of a young woman pulling herself out of the machine, as if the spaceship had a soul. Trying to understand the nature of this entity, they start chasing the woman through space… (official http://bloodmachines.com/)
This minis series (actually a movie in 3 chapters) was really hard to find, especially (like me) if you are not in a country where SHUDDER channel is supported (bad luck!). Shudder started making small genre productions, mostly horror but also SF, and the quality has been rising constantly. Many hidden gems still hide out there. Blood Machines was not in my tractor beam range for a long while, even if I knew about the Kickstarter crowdfunding project (since 2016). I knew Seth Ickerman’s was a French giant of retro 80s exploitation retrowave stylishness – mixing post-ironic, highly outrageous martial arts videos with bravado and VHS post-production VFXs. His Turbo Killer collaboration videoclip (Blood Machines 1) – with its cosmic space opera Cadillac cheap thrills grandeur and fashionista looks drowns everything in a pool of dark brooding space junk mysticism. Ickerman would be part of this new generation that adds a ton of pseudo- analog digital glitches, post filters that ooze unrepentant and nostalgic visuals. They are perfectly at home within the fold of synthwave retromania – nostalgia industries, while at the same time keeping it really really sleasy, steamy exploitation (Blood Machine has a +18 label).
Wanted to write about Blood Machines since a whole while and now friend Bogdan Lypkhanu, investigator of tantric SF, gave me the final ass kick.
Blood Machines has garnered either lots of hate as a grossed-out pile of plot-less, ham acting style dump or the perfect space opera tribute. I not so much interested in its tribute or retro aspect as in how it departs from most SF cinema depictions of spaceships in space opera sub-genre movies. Most spaceships (with the notable exception of Nostromo, Event Horizon, Lexx or Aniara more recently) are not really depicted as explicitly sentient, and I would say there is a lack not only of imagination, but of ‘wet imagination’, of corporeality in depicting a feeling, squelching, howling spaceship.
The organic – blood and flesh aspect of a biological spaceship brings me to biopunk – on a mystical cosmic, evolutionary scale, where various machinic ‘souls’. I am looking forward to spaceships where cellular and tissue aspects coexist, showing me how the universe is hosting artificial/grown entities with homeostatic millieus that pulsate, decay and mutate.
Maybe there’s more than a whiff of gender essentialism at work – rising from the fact that a lot of ships had female sounding heteronormative names (Mima), and this gets carried along in various cinematic space operas (except Millennium Falcon!). There is the cheesy lesbian undertone or even cultic Saphic love aspect to this Amazon tribe, a hidden vibration btw the spaceship protecting tribes and their eco-AI objects of care. The male characters gynophobia makes them even more of an offshoot of your Golden Age of SF captains, commanders, bounty hunters and space policemen.
It is a pity that Blood Machines is still partially stuck in a hetero male universe since there are new venues in space opera being explored by SF authors such as Benjanun Sriduangkaew – his Machine Mandate does not feature any cis males only lesbian characters, lots of sex and sleek shipminds. Both the two male pilots seem like a lot of comic relief ballast – atavistic remainders of a narcissist male hero obsessed genre that carries them on board in order to sacrifice them in the end (which is good!). The female-only tribes (‘oilsuckers‘) native to the movies exoplanet and the various ‘extracted’ mindship AIs are at the forefront of the movie. I really liked the way it reverses the Matrix Neo waking up in his pod, with the AI being extracted fully embodied in a human shape. Also the fact that the AI is somehow taking over the old mechanic co-pilot.
The AI taking this female human shape is also pretty stereotypical since it just follows that all spaceships search for the typical female white body (same as like the Ex Machine Alex Garland movie). Curious to finally seeAsian or African shipminds, that do not end embodied embody as white females. This typical pinup fembot girl is out of cult mags like MONDO2000 or Metal Hurlant comics (key SF cult comic French US book that left a long imprint) and Blood Machines never strays far from this. It is almost like these small, 21st c indie productions are the ones that the previous generations (from 1970s on) did not have the budget for, the tools or CGI acumen to do! That being said there is the Heavy Metal animation and a certain je ne sais quois, an undeniable french touch – +fose of eurotrash to it, that makes it quite a relief after the onslaught of the standard US SF. I am also excited a Romanian post FXs studio from Bucharest has been working on it – Avanpost media.
This penchant of the cyberdelic imaginary for what i would call – space fitness is also a big limitation, and restricts everything to these particular types of athletic, dancer bodies – as if one cannot fly in the universe if one is not trim, fit, flawless and more importantly streamlined. One of the interesting things is that a lot of the so-called space billionaires, beside the fact that they are mostly prone to be white, married (or divorced) and hetero white males, are also not at all what u might call owners of super sexy bodies. In fact they are completely unsexy and still they got a chance to fly high or entertain dreams of planetary escapism.
On screen one can only make into space or in the cosmos if one sports these type of healthy ‘efficient’ bodies that are increasingly being peddled both under hyper consumer capitalism and by art festivals. In order to prove one’s job dedication one has to keep this physicality on view & under control, keeping it fit at all times and under display – and under no circumstances is this body to look tired, flabby, wasted or out of shape. In Blood Machines the male spaceship hunters, hunting down rogue AI shipminds after some unspecified revolt of the machines, are definitely both unsexy and decrepit. I also like the grimness of the crusty Amazons, and the fact that they are multigenerational. Reminded me a bit of the natives of Zulawski’s Silver Globe from 1988.
At the same time there is in Blood Machines also a lot of sex magic at work, Pentagons, Pentagrams and ritualistic dance floor action. And for me this side of it was the most important – the fact that the spaceships are actually like huge interstellar beasts, whose hearts are still beating, even in a junkyard situation like stranded whales. The obvious – neo-gnostic – disembodiment of the shipmind, where the AI minds are ritualistically liberated is probably the most obvious part. These techgnostic rituals where vividly depicted, especially as Conspirituality is becoming almost a universal pop phenomenon. Erik Davis has been tracing out some of the consequences of that.
Call me a old trash SF hound, but I loved the last orgy scene where you get all these reversed crosses on the pubic hair of the embodied AIs. In a very trashy dance (end) scene these bodies are actually being choreographically and invisibly moved (even worse than in the recent remake of Suspiria) while linked to distant shipwrecks smashing into each other. There is also this glow – ‘auratic’ celeb glam to it, in a cover magazine way that puts to shame the usual very tired tropes of neo noir femme fatale cyberpunk (like the recent Reminiscence 2021 WB movie). There is a cosmic ‘satanist’ Thelema magick SF glory to this violet- magenta – lava lamp imagery, and the way space junk starts recomposing some tantric mandala is definitely one of my favorite movie endings, even if completely exxxploit, predictable and fan service (most probably).
“The arc of black history shares an uncanny resemblance to the plot points of classic sci-fi including ‘alien’ abduction, enslavement and rebellion. It’s this unlikely relationship that provides the inspiration for Afrofuturism, the broad cultural trend that encompasses works by Jean-Michel Basquiat to Grace Jones, Solange Knowles and Sun Ra. In this film, we meet, see and hear from artists across three continents who each, in their own way, explore the Afrofuture to look at the horrors of the black past and imagine alternative futures.
The mysterious yet influential Detroit techno duo, Drexciya, take the Atlantic Ocean, a site of death and destruction during the African slave trade and reclaim it as a place of creation and beauty. Through a series of releases from the late 1990s through the early 2000s, they envisage the unborn children of enslaved pregnant women, thrown overboard during the Middle Passage to the Americas, adapting to breathe under water and thrive in a Black Atlantis. The mythos is vividly brought to life by the Drexciyan collaborator and graphic artist Abdul Qadim Haqq as a thriving, technological undersea world.
A. Qadim Haqq and Dai Satō The Book of Drexciya: Volume One
Visual artist Ellen Gallagher similarly transforms the violence of the ocean into rebirth and renewal. Her film Osedax, made with Edgar Cleijne, is an imaginative retelling of how the skeletal remains of dead whales sustain new life in the curious form of the bone-devouring worm of the title. Whereas for artist Hew Locke, as well as the ocean itself, it’s the Atlantic’s coastal fringes that inspire his world of bricolage phantoms, plucked from the ghost stories of a Guyanese childhood.
Sun Ra
The Afrofuture is perhaps most commonly imagined through the rubric of outer space, thanks in no small part to avant-garde jazz musician and poet Sun Ra. Born in the southern US in the early 20th century, Ra underwent an interplanetary conversion, claiming to have been teleported to Saturn. As with funk pioneer, George Clinton, who describes a similar close encounter with extraterrestrials, Ra’s identification with an alien presence can be read as more than simple escapism. It’s also a biting satire on the alienating experience of being black in America. For Ra, space is also an alternate destiny for black people, as the title of his 1973 Afrofuturist feature film Space is the Place insists.
Reaching beyond these fictional ‘Afronauts’ is the conceptual artist Tavares Strachan. His performance piece, Star City, Training in Six Parts, sees Strachan visit the famous Russian space centre to undergo the same rigorous – and often tortuous – training of the Cosmonauts. Strachan likens one of the exercises, which measures our capacity to withstand disorientation and gravitational stress, to his impoverished upbringing in The Bahamas.
The film concludes with an exploration of the idea of double consciousness. Coined in the early 20th century by WEB Du Bois, the influential African American sociologist, double-consciousness describes how black people in western societies see themselves twice over. Through their lived experience but also how they’re perceived within a dominant white culture.
Curator and writer Ekow Eshun traces uses of the idea through Ralph Ellison’s lauded mid-20th-century novel Invisible Man, and painter Kerry James Marshall’s image of the same title, right up to the Black Lives Matter movement. Predicated upon recordings of anti-black violence often captured through digital tech, Eshun argues these ‘expose’ a double consciousness at work, the world as experienced and seen through black eyes, laid bare for all to witness.
Other artists and commentators featured in the programme include Nuotama Frances Bodomo, Aria Dean, Ayesha Hameed, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Shabaka Hutchings, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Cauleen Smith and Greg Tate.” (watch on BBC 4 page)
spacetime coordinates: in the not too distant-future of a devastated Earth
Tides (also known as The Colony) is a 2021 German-Swiss science fictionthriller 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.
TimeSpace Warps 