Contribution short abstract:

At the beginning of his career, Dr. Menzel had several dreams of transforming into his subject of research. During the night and sometimes during the day, he became a bee. Using a collaborative approach, the film sees his dreams as a way to build methods for exploring other-than-human minds.

Contribution long abstract:

Therianthropy is an ongoing work, mixing a documentary approach with video art, part of a DIY project called Apian which explores the age-old relationship between humans and bees (www.apian.ch). The film builds on Randolf Menzel’s dreams, a German zoologist who dedicated his life to studying bees. At the beginning of his career, he dreamt of becoming a bee. During the night and sometimes during the day, he had recurring experiences of shapeshifting into his subject of research. Evolving in line with his discoveries in the lab, his dreams, in return, were prompting certain directions in his research. Today, his dreams have stopped. They contain, however, a blueprint for methods of becoming. Whilst dreaming, the feedback loop of the sensomotoric system is numbed, lowering sensorial inputs. Meanwhile, the relation between the signifier and the signified is blurred, the two blend into each other, reducing the primacy of language. This work therefore sees dreams as lands where access to other-than-human minds is facilitated; an ideal space to ask what is it like to be a bee. Concerning the status of the film, the writing phase is almost over, about half of the filming is done, especially the scenes with Dr. Menzel which is based on a long-term collaboration with him directly in the field. During the workshop, I would like to tackle ontological and epistemological questions underlining the project and talk about its odd position between an art piece, a documentary and an ethnographic film.

Contribution short abstract:

The year is 2050, and the International Climate Observatory is using AI to reconstruct the events of a forest clearing in Germany. The animated short film uses original material and reactivates existing and free fictional material and thus follows a climate-conscious production.

Contribution long abstract:

The year is 2050, and the International Climate Observatory is using AI and new surveillance technologies to try to reconstruct the events of a forest clearing for the construction of the A49 highway in Germany. The events of the forest clearing, which took place between 2020 and 2021, saw the democratic order disrupted by extreme actions of activists and the police, leading to detentions and a general distrust of the police in the region. The AI's personality is to scan and analyze the police press reports and the activists' interviews to reconstruct the different realities and initiate a dialogue between the opposing parties. The AI is to solve the task of finding a new way of protest culture without creating victims and mistrust.

AI concludes that the constructed realities of the extreme activists and the extreme police, who make up only about 5 % of all those involved, are so opposed that no agreement could be reached. However, since 95 % of the activists involved are peaceful and the police involved are within the law, dialogue could be possible if the media stopped focusing on the extreme cases. Journalists are called upon to bring the different realities together instead of separating them.

The animated short film uses original material and reactivates existing and free fictional material and thus follows a climate-conscious production. It is fictional but reconstructed based on interviews with 42 activists and residents as well as 166 police press reports and 54 newspaper articles on the subject.

Contribution short abstract:

ORCHID, BEE and I is a film-based experiment that seeks to converge the anthropological and the speculative, as well as the lived experiences and world-building. It is a fictional ethnography of a near future, prompted by personal and collective experiences of the pandemic and the climate crisis.

Contribution long abstract:

ORCHID, BEE and I is a film-based experiment that centres around the encounter between the anthropological and the speculative and how this convergence expands both. Scenarios are key here. It is through scenarios that we piece together the different threads of world-building, such as, how people live, how they relate to each other and other species, what forms the dominant power takes, and so on. By imagining how a different world might manifest in everyday scenarios, we hope to keep the imaginary alive and flashed out rather than reduced to thin abstraction. Through the design of spaces, props and costumes as well as the soundscape, the scenarios reflect, confront, amplify or challenge certain aspects of the world we are living in now. Also, each scenario is a prompt for collaboration, including with movement artists, bio-designers, food designers, mask-makers, sound designers, filmmakers and researchers. World-building is a collective endeavour, after all.

In the world of ORCHID, BEE and I, the ecological collapse and the pandemic have exacerbated. A lonely person seeks paradoxical companionship with an orchid and a bee balloon to spend Christmas Day together. One of the scenarios is PLASTIC LOVE. Starting in the home, it raises questions about companionship and control.

As scenario-based, the project is always back and forth between researching, designing, shooting and editing. We’d love feedback on the balance between the complexity and nuance of messages and film as a medium for effective and affective communication.