Until 1 November our online screening programme Instability Stream can still be seen on our website and Youtube. Today we present three works that all draw on the power of worldbuilding and propose alternative futures. From non-human horizons to possible climate futures. This is possible through the use of game engines and CGI techniques.
CASSANDRA / КАССАНДРА (2020), by Laura Cugusi (IT) | Chiara Di Leone (IT) | Anastasiia Noga (RU)
Cassandra imagines a different way of conceiving the future habitability of Earth. It departs from the existing frameworks of scenario planning, which governmental and corporate entities use to strategize in the face of the unfolding climate change. It addresses the climate narratives that are written before climate projections and after climate modelling. The film and the project were developed by Laura Cugusi, Chiara Di Leone, Anastasiia Nogaas as part of Strelka’s The Terraforming 2020 programme.
Feel My Metaverse (2019), by Keiken and George Jasper Stone (UK)
Built within a game engine, Feel My Metaverse is a CGI film set in a hyper-fictional future, when the climate crisis has rendered the earth uninhabitable. Humans escape into a metaverse of virtual worlds, shown through the daily lives of three characters. The narrative critiques the disconnection between the monopolizing desires of corporate and futurist visions in the context of inequality and climate crisis. Keiken collective has members across London and Berlin, and works with film, installation, VR, AR, performance and gaming engines to conduct this world-building practice.
Loa’s Promise (2018), Joshua Ashish Dawson (IN)
Chile has had a tumultuous political and economic history. After dictator Augusto Pinochet’s reign ended in 1990, the country adopted a market-based allocation system for water, relinquishing state oversight and allowing corporations to take control. Over the years, thriving corporations began to monopolize resources. The oasis town of Quillagua, reliant on the depleted and polluted Loa River, now faces a similar fate… Loa’s Promise envisions the outcome of this situation, presenting an alternate history and a possible future where the desert’s ghost towns have been retrofitted as data centers and digital mines, effacing past memories.