August 5th – September 20th 2020
My film Notes from the subsurface has been selected for the Strangelove Timebased Media Festival. The film was created as part of my EarthArt Fellowship at Bristol University’s Earth and Life Sciences during 2019-20.
Film synopsis:
Notes from the subsurface interrogates deep subsurface environments and the extremophiles that live within them to consider how they can function at extreme depths and pressure within challenging conditions such as highly acidic, high temperature, high radiation, low oxygen and methane heavy environments.
Through sci-fi narratives, the twelve minute film exposes non-human and multi-species perspectives, hidden networks and unheard voices. Beginning with bird-eye view footage of the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies, the film’s initial documentary approach comments on the soft bodied organisms fossilised in the sediment that was once below our feet.
The second part of the film takes a science fictional approach; as the narrators firstly develop proposals for adapting humans to live in these extreme conditions, utilising a ‘Vision Space’ to adapt their perspectives and then employing designs for hybrid future lifeforms capable of living within these environments. With designs generated using an AI neural network app (creating images from text), it references discussions around genetically modifying lifeforms for extraterrestrial exploration. The film closes with new lifeforms brought to life through an evolved form of bio printing, leaving us thinking about whether these will function as the future of human life on earth.