A Town Called Panic (French: Panique au village) is a 2009 internationally co-produced stop-motion animated adventure fantasy comedy family film directed by Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar.
The film is based on the TV series of the same name and stars Aubier, Jeanne Balibar, Nicolas Buysse, Véronique Dumont, Bruce Ellison, Frédéric Jannin, Bouli Lanners, and Patar, among others. It premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and was the first stop-motion film to be screened at the festival.
Empire magazine were very positive awarding the film 4 stars, summing it up as “Toy Story on absinthe” (wiki)
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.
“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: 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.
The Animatrix (Japanese: アニマトリックス, Hepburn: Animatorikkusu) is a 2003 animated science fiction anthology film produced by the Wachowskis. It is a compilation of nine animated short films based on The Matrix trilogy.
The film details the backstory of The Matrix series, including the original war between humankind and machines which led to the creation of the titular Matrix. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 