Part Five | Extraction by Different Means
Join us on e-flux Video & Film for Extraction by Different Means, the fifth part of the online series Ecology After Nature convened by Lukas Brasiskis.
In this fifth part, Misho Antadze’s The Harvest (2019) and Ivar Veermäe’s The Flood (2018-2019) examine the process of cryptocurrency mining and the ecological implications of this new mode of energy consumption, where digital ways of extraction are shown to be as environmentally harmful and socially exploitative as the mining and excavation of natural resources.
The films will screen for two weeks from Sunday, Sunday, October 11 through Saturday, October 24, 2020.
Ecology After Nature
Part Five | Extraction by Different Means
Sunday, October 11—Saturday, October 24, 2020
Misho Antadze, The Harvest, 2019
70 minutes
Ostensibly a seventy-minute study of the cryptocurrency boom in Georgia, The Harvest also charts the cartography, ecology, and history of technology via the vineyard region of Kakheti—a nexus point where agriculture, modern technological infrastructure, and natural wilderness converge. Specifically focusing on the growth of massive computer banks for mining Bitcoin, the film explores the impact that new technologies are having on this peripheral area of Europe, in which the boundaries between the material and virtual worlds are frequently blurred.
Ivar Veermäe, The Flood, 2018-2019
11 minutes
Shot in Estonia, The Flood is a look at cryptocurrency: on the one hand, a research into its various mining practices and energy needs; and on the other hand, an abstract exploration of its forms, concepts, and ideas. Virtual currency—specifically, Bitcoin—offers an attempt to withdraw from the existing financial system, with the objective to release the production of money from the central banks’ control by reinstating the idea of money as an agreement. However, while this idea of decentralization is attractive, it is inevitably accompanied by the risk that new centers or bubbles will arise. Small mines are replaced by increasingly bigger ones, some of which are located on the premises of power station—in a cost-effective bid to cope with the ever-vaster demand for energy needed to mine virtual currencies. The video, part of a three-channel installation, combines footage from Estonian oil shale mines (a major energy resource in Estonia) and from home-scale and industrial-scale crypto mines, alongside 3D animations that recall the original use of the powerful graphic cards enlisted to encrypt and decrypt currency transactions.
About the program
Ecology After Nature: Industries, Communities and Environmental Memory is an online series of film programs and discussions that places reflections on administrative, instrumental, and extractive treatments of nature at its forefront, and exposes various angles of interconnection between the natural and the human-made.
Programmed by Lukas Brasiskis, the series will present a selection of 22 artists’ films and videos to be screened on e-flux Video & Film in six thematic parts. From extractive industries, forgotten remnants of war machines, and polluting warehouses of cryptomining to misinterpreted birds, misheard earth strata, and vibrant landfills, the artists featured in this series highlight a non-essentialist view of the manifold forms that the natural takes in today’s world. The screenings will be accompanied by two online discussions (on October 1 and November 5) with some of the participating artists and invited guests, including T.J. Demos and media and culture scholar Heather Davis, inquiring how the infrastructural, the elemental, and the communal could be reassessed through moving images, with a focus on the social and political particularities of environmental issues.
Ecology After Nature runs from August 14 through November 8, 2020. Launching today, and screening for the next two weeks, are the four films in Part Two: War Machines and Environmental Memories. Subsequent parts will follow bi-weekly, with new films screened every other Sunday. Screenings and discussions will be published on the series’ platform on e-flux Video & Film.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
