Geocinema project investigates planetary-scale sensory networks that consist of multiple forms of recording, transmitting, processing, calibrating, stitching and reworking images in complex feedback loops between satellites, geosensors, cell phones, surveillance cameras, ground observation and more. In a conversation with media theorist Jussi Parikka, filmmaker Solveig Suess and art historian Asia Bazdyrieva address these multiple scales of large infrastructural systems as they not only challenge the modes of representation, but also require novel ways of understanding visual aesthetics in such geopolitical systems. Drawing on the recent field work on the Digital Belt and Road Initiative in China, they speak, among other things, about the oblique connections between past Jesuit contributions to techniques of earth sensing, vast resource extraction, and current demands aimed towards battling a future of climate change. Here, filmmaking and collaborative practices become both a mode of research and a modest proposition to draw missing planetary connections.
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Jussi Parikka is a writer, media theorist and professor in technological culture & aesthetics at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). He is the author of various books on media archaeology, digital culture and technical media, including Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (2010), What is Media Archaeology? (2011), and A Geology of Media (2015).

Geocinema consists of art historian Asia Bazdyrieva and filmmaker Solveig Suess. Bazdyrieva studied analytical chemistry at the Kyiv National University (2009) and art history at The City University of New York as a Fulbright grantee (2017). Suess completed her undergraduate in Visual Cultures at the Glasgow School of Art, with her postgraduate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University, London (2017). Bazdyrieva and Suess started their collaboration at the New Normal urban design think-tank, Strelka Institute, Moscow (2018).

The podcast features Jessika Khazrik’s music composed for Geocinema’s next documentary (expected in 2020) as well as “I Am Not Your History” from “Terrella Al2ard Alsaghira” (2017). 

The conversation was recorded in Berlin, following a collaboration between Parikka and Geocinema under the Digital Earth Fellowship in 2018-2019.

Geocinema in conversation with Jussi Parikka

A live film-score by Josh Feola accompanying Geocinema’s fully immersive storyboard. Score includes remixed soundtracks by Jessika Khazrik and Zaliva-D. Story-board lyrics and visuals are created while Geocinema has been plotting towards their next documentary. Featuring lyrics generated by a futuresforecast, a natural language processing algorithm made in collaboration with Qiao Lin.

Geocinema

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