Outside the Timeline of Progress: Techno-Material Traces, Post-Human Landscapes, and The New Social

Join us on e-flux Video & Film Thursday, November 5, 2020 at 1pm EST for Outside the Timeline of Progress: Techno-Material Traces, Post-Human Landscapes, and The New Social—an online discussion with Misho Antadze, Thirza Cuthand, Heather Davis, Su Yu Hsin, and Arjuna Neuman, moderated by Lukas Brasiskis.

Outside the Timeline of Progress: Techno-Material Traces, Post-Human Landscapes, and The New Social is the second of two discussions in the ongoing online series Ecology After Nature: Industries, Communities, and Environmental Memory​ programmed by Lukas Brasiskis, which features 22 films to be screened over six thematic chapters between August 14 through November 8, 2020 (currently on its final part, Part Six).

In the time of the Anthropocene that disproves the neoliberal vision of permanent progress based on linear anthropocentric temporality, the artists in this discussion suggest new ways to rethink the world in their films. Human activities—material and digital—increasingly prompt economically distributed slow ecological and social violence. Adjustments of film lenses and pace are required to image these otherwise invisible processes, characteristic of non-linear timelines and multi-scalar effects.

In this discussion with writer and researcher Heather Davis, and moving-image artists Thirza Cuthand, Arjuna Neuman, Misho Antadze, and Su Yu Hsin, we will talk about the films screened so far as part of Ecology After Nature, and ask: What does the focus on longue-durée reveal about the Anthropocene? What does technology look like attended from a non-techno-capitalist perspective? How do films approach material traces of the colonial past to open up the space for the imagination of postcolonial futures? How to represent the anthropocenic disaster, hopefully without erasing the possibility of a new social?—among other questions and themes moderated by Lukas Brasiskis.

The discussion will be livestreamed on this page, with audience Q&A available via chat.

Misho Antadze was born in 1993 in Tbilisi. In 2011 he left for California to study Film and Video Arts at the Arts Institute of California–CalArts. In 2014, his documentary film The Many Faces of Comrade Gelovani premiered at the Viennale. Antadze graduated from CalArts in 2015 and continued working in the US for the next two years as a translator, film editor, and director. After finishing production of his feature-length documentary The Harvest (2019), Antadze moved to Amsterdam, where he is currently finishing his research at the Netherlands Film Academy. His short films have been shown at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, L’Age d’Or Brussels, and many other film and contemporary art venues.

Lukas Brasiskis is a film and media researcher and curator, currently a PhD candidate at New York University in the Department of Cinema Studies, and an adjunct professor at NYU and CUNY/Brooklyn College. His interests include eco-media, the politics and aesthetics of the world cinema, and intersections between moving-image cultures and the contemporary art world. Brasiskis’ texts have been published in both academic and non-academic media, and he has curated a number of screening programs, Including From Matter to Data: Ecology of Infrastructures (with Inga Lace, Post MoMa, New York), Environmental Memories in East-Central European Art (Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade), Landscape to be Experienced and to be Read: Time, Ecology, Politics on the work of filmmaker James Benning (CAC, Vilnius), Mermaid with The Movie Camera (Spectacle Theater, New York), a program of experimental films Human, Material, Machine (with Leo Goldsmith, CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania), Baltic Poetic Documentary as Ethnographic Cinema (NYU, New York), Welcome to the Anthropocene (CCAMP, Lithuania), and a retrospective of the films of Nathaniel Dorsky (CAC, Vilnius) among others.

Thirza Jean Cuthand was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, and grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995 she has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity and love, and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Mix Brasil Festival of Sexual Diversity in Sao Paolo, ImagineNATIVE in Toronto, Frameline in San Francisco, Outfest in Los Angeles, and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival. Her work has been shown at the Mendel in Saskatoon, The National Gallery in Ottawa, and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis among other venues. In the summer of 2016 she began working on a 2D videogame called A Bipolar Journeybased on her experience learning and dealing with her bipolar disorder. It showed at ImagineNATIVE, and she is planning to further develop it. She has also written three feature screenplays, and has performed at Live At The End Of The Century in Vancouver, Queer City Cinema’s Performatorium in Regina, and 7a*11d in Toronto. In 2017 she won the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. She is a Whitney Biennial 2019 artist. She is a non-binary Butch boy who uses She/Her pronouns. She is of Plains Cree and Scots descent, a member of Little Pine First Nation, and currently resides in Toronto, Canada.

Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School. Her current book project, Plastic Matter, argues that plastic has transformed the material world due to its incredible longevity and range, as it has also transformed our understandings and expectations of matter and materiality. She is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She was the co-curator of Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials (on view at the Palmer Museum of Art, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Smith College, and the Chazen Museum of Art, 2018-2020). Davis has written widely for art and academic publications on questions of contemporary art, politics, and ecology, and has lectured internationally, including at MoMA, Columbia, MIT, Sonic Acts Academy, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Transmediale, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Yinchuan Biennale. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015) and editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill Queen’s UP, 2017).

Su Yu Hsin is a Taiwanese artist and filmmaker currently based in Berlin. She weaves together tropes of artistic documentary and essay film and uses composite imagery and video installations to materialize her technological, ecological, and infrastructural investigations of planetary imaginations. Su Yu Hsin participated in group exhibitions in Kyoto Art Center (2020), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2019), and Junín Contemporary Art Museum (2018). She was the finalist artist in LOOP Barcelona Discover (2018). Her upcoming shows are Taipei Biennial 2020, with new commissioned work by ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Taipei Fine Art Museum.

Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. His work has been presented at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Istanbul Modern, Istanbul; Sharjah Biennial, UAE; Bergen Assembly, Norway; at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; the 56th Venice Biennale and SuperCommunity; the Haus Der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; at KEM, Warsaw; at Ashkal Alwan and the Beirut Art Center, Beirut; Le Gaite Lyric, Paris; the Canadian Center for Architecture; and the Rat School of Art, Seoul among others. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings Journal, and e-flux journal. He also grows tomatoes and chillies in his studio.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.