Geocinema is an ongoing episodic project by Asia Bazdyrieva, Alexey Orlov, Solveig Suess
Orbital bands of satellites, geosensing arrays, surveillance cameras and billions of cell phones – clusters of components for networked global connectivity, sense fragments of the earth. Through decentralized editing processes, signals and transfers create a stitched representation of the earth. As an ongoing curatorial investigation, Geocinema considers these planetary-scale sensory networks as a vastly distributed cinematic apparatus, a camera.
For this new commission, the next phase Framing Territories, Geocinema focuses its research on Digital Belt and Road (DBAR), the Big Earth Data programme supporting Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a Chinese-led trade route spanning Asia, Europe and Africa, with ambition and promise of global connectivity. Large-scale efforts along the Belt and Road explicit a data-driven framework to guide the future of environmental decision and policy-making, mirrored with large-scale infrastructural plans to terraform its landscapes.
The Geocinema collective, Bazdyrieva, Orlov & Suess, will take a series of research trips to the first branch of the DBAR programme in Thailand — to further understand these new mirrored processes of imaging and terraforming, from modelling into policy. Filming a series of interviews, archival materials, set-ups, models and imaginings they will examine infrastructures of data as forms of cinema. Asking; how is the earth imaging and sensing itself, and, are there ways to stitch together other imaginaries? through a queered natural history documentary.
Framing Territories has been commissioned by The New Networked Normal and will be showcased on the freeport platform, and at Freeport: Terminal MCR, a one week AND take over the University of Salford, MediaCityUK.
The New Networked Normal (NNN) explores art, technology and citizenship in the age of the Internet, a partnership project by Abandon Normal Devices (UK), Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (ES), The Influencers (ES), Transmediale (DE) and STRP (NL). This project has been co-funded with support from the Creative Europe programme.
