In a sadly not so distant future, humanity is trying to rescue our climate with the help of Geo-Engineering. As a result, you can find giant machines spread around the world. Stuck in neverending loops, they are fighting the symptoms of climate-change by refreezing polar-ice, plugging cloud covers and pushing back deserts.
These little films were devised as part of a media installation in which the videos play in seemles loops, making it seem like they they are doing the exact same tasks over and over again.
You can unmute the videos in the controls, that come up when you hover over the videos.
GEO-ENGINEERING | CONSERVE
GEO-ENGINEERING | SHIELD
GEO-ENGINEERING | PROTECT
Cinematic Versions
Because I wanted to show the films in cinema for our yearly presentation I had to create alternate versions of them. In cinema the loop would only run once so people might not have enough time processing the information and to understand what I am trying to say. So I decided to create versions of the films, that included a narrator, to give al little more context. Then Covid got in the way so for CONSERVE there's only my voice doing the narration. Other than that Filip Dippel is the narrator while Áron Farkas did the recording.
GEO-ENGINEERING | CONSERVE
GEO-ENGINEERING | SHIELD
GEO-ENGINEERING | PROTECT
Concept and Design
I first got the idea to these films while listening to a podcast that explained the concept of geo- or climate-engineering. The podcast adressed the potential this could have but also the high risk that would come with it. It quoted researchers in the field of geo-engineering and even they were against using it or only using it as a last resort. While technology might help solve some problems in the short term, we are not able to predict all, and especially long-term side-effects, such a large interference into eco-systems might have.
Doing my own research I was suprised by how big of a scientific field this was and how widely it was being discussed. I exlpored some proposed projects and to me it seemed like most of them were only trying to fix the symptoms of the climate-crisis rather the the climate-crisis itself. Even worse a lot of them were just sweep it under the carpet kind of proposals. All of the films are based on actual proposals. Although I have to admit I might have exaggerated them a bit. SHIELD for example is based on the most commonly discussed project (at least at the time), that got inspired by a vulcanic-eruption that caused a giant smoke-cloud impervious to light. The average temperature in the areas beneath the cloud dropped bay 2 degrees celsius.
