The Sky Oscillates Between Eternity and Its Immediate Consequences
2021
18:10 minutes
To view the work, please contact me for a link
In 2017, the World Government Summit displayed audiovisual documentations of how we will live on Mars in 2117. In the same year, the Museum of the Future in Dubai showed a “documentary about the year 2050.” A documentary of the future sounds bizarre however it functions similarly to the stock market and rendered urban planning. Whether the price is ever reached or the city is ever built, it has material consequences on the present. So in a sense documentaries of the future are not so much about the future but a documentary about what is at stake in the present. And time is the most valuable thing.
The Sky Oscillates Between Eternity and Its Immediate Consequences is a film exploring how the future of smart cities relies on the promise of “sustainable” closed systems in the face of health and ecological crises. Two protagonists narrate how the control, isolation, and exploitation of time including environmental life cycles, seasons, and organisms’ lifetimes form the blueprint to achieve such futuristic visions.
Based on the yet to be built Mars Science City in Dubai, the video is composed of digitally rendered environments and stock footage. Using the same methods to produce documentaries of the future, this film shows how that effects our present and how do we live with it or against it.
This work was commissioned and produced by Art Jameel and is part of the Art Jameel Collection.