time machine // database // travel guide
!DISTURBING CONTENT!
Relic is a 2020 Australian horror drama film directed by Natalie Erika James in her directorial debut, from a screenplay by James and Christian White. It stars Emily Mortimer, Robyn Nevin and Bella Heathcote. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 2134. United States – dystopic irradiated wasteland known as the Cursed Earth. / Mega-City One (running from Boston to Washington DC), a violent metropolis with 800 million residents and 17,000 serious crimes reported daily. / Peach Trees, a 200-storey slum tower block /
Dredd is a 2012 British / South African science fiction action film directed by Pete Travis and written and produced by Alex Garland. It is based on the 2000 AD comic strip Judge Dredd and its eponymous character created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra.
Karl Urban stars as Judge Dredd, a law enforcer given the power of judge, jury and executioner in a vast, dystopic metropolis called Mega-City One that lies in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Dredd and his apprentice partner, Judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), are forced to bring order to a 200-storey high-rise block of flats and deal with its resident drug lord, Ma-Ma (Lena Headey). *unrelated to the 1995 film Judge Dredd. (wiki)
I finally realized that if I was ever going to find any words in which I could tell stories about my world, if I was ever going to approach the center of the world in my writing, I was going to have to take lessons from the people who lived there, who had always lived there, the people who were the land—the old ones, the first ones, trees, rocks, animals, human people. I was going to have to be very quiet, and learn to listen to them. (Le Guin, 1988/2019: 751)
Music and Poetry of the Kesh is the documentation of an invented Pacific Coast peoples from a far distant time, and the soundtrack of famed science fiction author, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home. In the novel, the story of Stone Telling, a young woman of the Ksh, is woven within a larger anthropological folklore and fantasy. (from bandcamp)
The ways of the Kesh were originally presented in 1985 as a five hundred plus page book accompanied with illustrations of instruments and tools, maps, a glossary of terms, recipes, poems, an alphabet (Le Guin’s conlang, so she could write non-English lyrics), and with early editions, a cassette of “field recordings” and indigenous song. Le Guin wanted to hear the people she’d imagined; she embarked on an elaborate process with her friend Todd Barton to invoke their spirit and tradition.
Always coming home is a musical feature by NTS radio with words words by Andrea Zarza Canova, various field recordings and a tracklist based on the above and the book by Ursula K LeGuin Always coming home. Original is here
Upon reading Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin, one feels as though entering an anthropological museum filled with artefacts from a past civilization; we can discover maps charting where the Kesh lived, drawings and descriptions of the plants, trees and rivers that surrounded them; collections of recipes and descriptions of how they dressed; detailed notes explaining their society, kinship, sexuality, medicine and funerary rites; folk tales, plays, poems, stories and descriptions of rites and rituals, with detailed descriptions of what their instruments looked and sounded like.
Pandora is the archaeologist, historian and anthropologist who describes the Kesh in this ethnographic account of a non-existent civilization. For both us readers and Pandora, also referred to as the Editor, the Kesh exist in the future, in a post-apocalyptic California. A note at the beginning of the book makes us aware of this with a complex use of verbal tenses—“The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California”. This note is one of the few occasions where we hear Le Guin’s voice, for Always Coming Home is instead a patchwork of Kesh voices that come to life through poems, songs, storytelling, oral histories and a novel, collected or recounted by the narrator Pandora. (fragment from text by Andrea Zarza Canova)
The Gardens Between is a puzzle video game developed by Australian studio The Voxel Agents, released in September 2018 for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. (wiki)
The Gardens Between is a surreal puzzle adventure that follows best friends, Arina and Frendt, as they fall into a mysterious world of beautiful garden islands. Manipulate time to solve puzzles and discover the secrets of each island.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (MINIMUM): OS: 7 / Processor: 1.8 GHz / Memory: 4 GB RAM / Graphics: Intel HD 4000 Series / DirectX: Version 10 / Storage: 2 GB available space
Frank, an opportunistic insurance lawyer, thinks he’s in for the time of his life when he goes out on the town to celebrate an upcoming promotion with his co-worker, Jeff. But their night takes a turn for the bizarre when Frank is dosed with a hallucinogen that completely alters his perception of the world, taking him on a psychedelic quest through board meetings, nightclubs, shootouts, and alternate dimensions. As Frank ping-pongs between reality and fantasy, he finds himself on a mission to find a missing girl, himself – and his wallet. (imdb)
directed by Gille Klabin starring Justin Long, Tommy Flanagan, Donald Faison, Sheila Vand, Katia Winter.
timespace coordinates: ~3400 – 3100 BCE the Ötztal Alps, Chalcolithic (Copper Age) Europe
Iceman (German: Der Mann aus dem Eis) is a 2017 German-Italian-Austrian adventure film directed by Felix Randau. It is a fictional story about the life of Ötzi, a natural mummy of a man found in 1991 in the Ötztal Alps. (wiki)
The characters speak an early version of Rhaetic, a language related to Etruscan and spoken by pre-Indo Europeans living in the region.
timespace coordinates: early 23rd century, mining station O.I. Infini
Infini is a 2015 Australian science fiction film directed by Shane Abbess and starring Daniel MacPherson, Grace Huang, Luke Hemsworth and Tess Haubrich.
An elite ‘search and rescue’ team transport onto an off-world mining-facility to rescue Whit Carmichael, the lone survivor of a biological outbreak.
Oliver Pfeiffer of SciFiNow rated it 4/5 stars and called it “bold, gut-wrenching” with the “real masterstroke at play…the menacingly immersive production design and deeply atmospheric soundtrack”. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 