‘Geocinema’ considers planetary-scale sensory networks
—cell phones, surveillance cameras, satellites, geosensors— as a vastly distributed cinematic apparatus: a camera.

Sensing fragments of the earth
their operations generate terabytes of raw data, infrastructural architectures, obscured labour, dissonant weather, governmental policies, scientific management, environments and situations
each participating in the changing of the earth’s fabric through their own sets of scales and temporalities.
Here, the representation of earth is the sum of a decentralized editing process with its image anything but whole.

‘Geocinema’ considers planetary-scale sensory networks
—cell phones, surveillance cameras, satellites, geosensors— as a vastly distributed cinematic apparatus: a camera.
Sensing fragments of the earth,
each signal and transfer runs through their own sets of scales and temporalities while producing terabytes of raw data.
Here, the representation of the earth is the sum of a decentralized editing process with its image anything but whole.

The project unfolds as a series of episodic research into geocinema through experiments in moving image, narration and collective thinking. Each probes into ways of understanding and sensing the earth while being on the ground, enmeshed within vastly distributed processes of image and meaning making.

The project traces the physical infrastructures and abstracted processes which make up the supply chains of perception, attentive to the situated histories of sensing techniques which frame movements of the cosmos, atmospheres, oceans, and surveil flows of bodies and their congregations, in order to unstitch and restitch given narratives about earths.

Episode 01

Framing Territories
2018-2020

Framing Territories looks at the One Belt One Road initiative, spanning across Asia, Europe and Africa with an ambition of developing trade routes and a techno-modernist promise of global connectivity. Large-scale efforts along the Belt and Road explicits a data-driven framework to guide the future of environmental decision-making, mirrored by large-scale infrastructural plans to manipulate its landscapes. This would rapidly rescript how we understand and govern environments and populations, co-producing certain natures.

Episode 02

Registering Solar
Ongoing

The sun’s photons translate into data by an ecology of recording devices. Registering Solar moves from the scale of photons to ourselves as prosthesis for how the earth senses itself. Time and place specific, here we look at how geocinema is informed not necessarily by events that trigger its attention but rather through the very slow processes of how environments are sensed.

Episode 03

Editing Worlds

In its vertical dissection, the earth is wrapped by more than 7 million scenes by the Landsat satellites. Following the trajectory of satellites, Editing Worlds turns to the wrapping of the earth through systems of measurement and the synchronisation of data, from models and their tools. While geocinema has long been a method of making sense of where we are in the cosmos—scales of bodies, their movements and tempos, have simultaneously been quantified, controlled and managed unevenly back down on ground.

Episode 04

Distributing Otherwise

Episode 04 turns its focus to the geocinematic patterning of attention spans. It tunes in into modern myths of inexplicable phenomena — events that never happened because there were no systems to register it. Cutting across time, the episode jumps through chronological logics to speculate what might exist in-between and beyond modes of sensing operations.

Geocinema is a project made in collaboration between

Asia Bazdyrieva and Solveig Suess

with Jessika Khazrik on music and sound.


Contact us via mail

TRAILERS

Filmed, edited, produced:
Asia Bazdyrieva, Alexey Orlov, Solveig Suess

Sound Design:
Nikita Alekseenko
Music:
Episode 01: Nikita Alekseenko
Episode 02: Josh Feola
Episode 03: Josh Feola, Georgiy Potopalskiy
Episode 04: Jessika Khazrik, “Only Distance Has a Name,”
from “My Communication Is Not Work”, 2018
“I Am Not Your History” from “Terrella Al2ard Alsaghira,” 2017

Web Development

John Grishin, Kirill Kotov