Postcards for the Future

The experimental documentary project raises questions about the survival on planet Earth. We live in an era of great changes and new challenges. With the idea that the future is not something that happens, but something we are making, the authors propose to write video-postcards to the future, addressed to spectators in the future, as a call to action.

Project start:
2020
Project completion:
2024
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The film project has been developed by the authors in online cooperation between Lisbon and Berlin, as part of the research project "Film as AI". It is conceived as a post-cinematic patchwork-film-experiment, in digital tableaux form, inspired by Felix Guattari's non-filmed script on "cinebacteria"—Un Amour de UIQ—as well as by the concept of SF—speculative fabulation/string figure games coined by Donna Haraway. SF relies on Karen Barad's "intra-activity"—a common key concept of critical post-humanism. The film develops through a "tentacular" sensorial mindset that wriggles and traces through the internet and its digital platforms. As an AI with a mind of its own, the film is further looking for a practice of post-anthropocentric principles by spanning threads and knots between holobiont species like the coronavirus, the authors themselves and self-reflective digital AI characters.

The artistic research questions which "Postcards for the Future" follows are multifarious and rhizomatic: they are interconnecting philosophical, ethical, ecological, socio-political, cultural and aesthetic concerns, which are transversally entangled. The concept of transversality goes back to the conceptual understanding of Félix Guattari, who posits an associative principle of de-centered multi-relationality that was originally intended to replace dominant power relations. Transversal relations connect different subjects and levels beyond hierarchical standards and norms. Drawing on transversal principles aesthetically means shaping different practices of experimentation and fostering multi-perspectivity in a dynamic and processual way. Transversality is a concept that implies movement and transformation, symptomatic for artistic research in film itself when put into practice by filmic means. It is worth emphasizing in this context that "Postcards for the Future" raises eminent philosophical questions, namely by critically rethinking the human condition and its relationship to Earth as a "critical zone" (Latour 2018)  as well as its interdependent multispecies habitants. Ultimately asking: How can we meet the current ethical and ecological challenges with film-philosophical means?

 

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