The Anthropocene Project and the archiviolithic imaginary

In ‘Archiviolithic: the Anthropocene and the hetero-archive’, Claire Colebrook suggests that the Anthropocene, the name that Earth scientists are proposing for our current geological epoch, ‘can be defined as a concept both in the Derridean and Deleuzian-Guattarian senses’.¹ In the Derridean sense, the concept makes us confront humanity’s self-archiving as well as archiviolithic tendencies (the latter described by the philosopher as archive-destroying or forgetfulness-imposing), rendered evident in its overall logic of readability.² The Deleuzian-Guattarian analytic, on the other hand, invites us to locate in it a field of becoming in which the simultaneity of relations between human, techno and biotic spheres can come to the fore. In thinking the two Anthropocenes together, Colebrook’s aim is not to favour one over the other or to defend deconstructivist methodologies against criticism by twenty-first century modes of predominantly realist thought.³ Rather, she ponders, what if one considers the Anthropocene as a deconstructive concept, which requires the acknowledgement of a different kind of destruction: one that Derrida failed to recognize within his own milieu of thought; one that is brought about not just by paradoxical archival drives but by recalcitrant matter’s denial of a readable future.

Such a question has valence for cinema studies too. In recent multidisciplinary media projects with filmic as well as post-cinematic media, art and design components, one can detect the undercurrent of an archiviolithic imaginary, in which the logic behind the desire to document the impact of humanity is marked by an aporia (an internal logic that works against the archive it tries to build). These works, such as the Burtynsky-Baichwal-De Pencier trio’s The Anthropocene Project, from 2018, feverishly project the unfolding drama of the Anthropocene onto an increasingly splintered and diversified media landscape, with the seeming desire to render the human imprint on ecology readable. Yet in doing so they often produce media spectacles that are complicated, if not undermined, by the paradoxical logic of the concept, as well as by technological immersion’s ambiguous relation to invoking environmental awareness, and by and the resistance of matter to being subsumed in a human archive. Thinking about the potential of such projects therefore calls for a reconsideration of archive–reality relations in this latest stage of the ecological crisis.

At first glance The Anthropocene Project, which was introduced to the public with a grand multimedia exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto in autumn 2018, is all about the non-hierarchical relationality between various photographic, filmic and post-cinematic media. Walking into the gallery, the viewers encounter a rich constellation of media technologies and materialities, cataloguing the massive impact of human activities on land, water and sky. Among these are large-scale aerial Edward Burtynsky photographs, gigapixel essays and high-resolution murals (approximately ten by twenty feet each), video installations by Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas De Pencier, AR and VR components, interactive infographic maps, and a hardcover fine-art book. The accompanying documentary film, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018), produced by the artist trio as the last in a trilogy of films that includes their earlier eco-documentaries Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and Watermark (2013), was released in theatres almost simultaneously with the exhibition, turning the project into a full transmedia experience. In the exhibition’s accompanying fine-art book, reflections by co-curators Sophie Hackett and Andrea Kunard foreground the material and experiential relations between the project’s media and the realities they capture.⁴ Hackett states that the central question facing the artists in the project was ‘how to best capture and convey the sheer scale’ of Anthropogenic activity and adds: ‘it is no surprise that the artists have produced large-scale photographs and film installations – but they also push beyond singular experiences of a photograph or a film, the still or moving image’.⁵ Navigating the exhibition, the viewer encounters the distribution of media objects in an order that is reminiscent of what object-oriented and materialist philosophies would call a ‘flat ontology’. No single medium is highlighted or privileged as representative of the project’s dominant aesthetic. Photographic, filmic, infographic, AR and VR components are all displayed in a spatial configuration that lacks clear boundaries or lines of separation. In the immediate mid-section of the gallery space, around thirty of Burtynsky’s large-scale aerial photographs are exhibited on ceiling-to-floor banners placed at a precise distance from each other.

During a tour offered during the Ontario Climate Symposium in October 2018, an AGO tour guide repetitively referred to this section as ‘the forest’. The arboreal labelling of a section that features imagery captured by highly sophisticated aerial technologies, including drones, has a strange naturalizing effect on the imperial/colonial and militarist history of aerial images. In her study of the media work of French filmmaker-photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, who is well-known for his post-cinematic Anthropocene projects in the European context, Zoë Druick provides a detailed critique of that history and its ideological implications for the director’s eco-doc Home (2009):

shot in 120 locations in 54 countries, with every shot taken from the air, Home itself expresses techno-imperialist logistics. It is a perfect emblem of the elite European male traveller’s frictionless mobility, the filmic equivalent of the environmental epics and ‘global travel narratives’ that Ursula Heise (2012) identifies as increasingly common. Such stories often feature a moral ‘journalist, scientist or activist who travels around the world to heroically report on crisis hotspots’ in an attempt to portray the ‘world in its entirety’ (Heise). And just as these stories invariably demand a ‘globalized and cosmopolitan self’ as constituent part of an ‘environmentalist ethic,’ their visual equivalent is the Apollonian view of Earth from outer space.⁶

The Anthropocene Project exhibition, featuring imagery from forty-seven global locations, shares quite a few similar strategies with Arthus-Bertrand’s multidisciplinary works, including a celebration of aerial imagery taken to new heights and scale through the latest technology. The documentary film itself reportedly consists of eighty-seven minutes of content, including aerial footage, from twenty countries and six continents. The AGO’s hardcover fine-art book even features a brief summary of the long history of the aerial view yet downplays the colonial tradition that Druick associates it with. Burtynsky does the contextualizing work himself in public lectures, arguing that the extreme resolution allowed by gigapixel imagery has the potential to disrupt the flattening effect associated with aerial imagery. The resolution allows one to zoom in on the images almost endlessly, providing the equivalent of an Earth zoom that renders extreme vantage points simultaneously accessible. Instead of accounting for whether the earth zoom effect is redeeming of the technique or not, the summary focuses on aerial imagery as an environmentally powerful aesthetic tool.⁷ What this tool supports is seemingly a primal impulse: ‘to try to see ourselves in the world, apart from ourselves – a seemingly paradoxical aim’.⁸ This statement also brings competing logics (humanist and realist) into a subtle clash with one other. More specifically, in trying to deflect attention from aerial imagery’s loaded politics,⁹ Hackett strikingly runs into an archival paradox (seemingly between the self-archiving and archive-destroying tendencies of the filmic approach). This is where her contextualization of the project makes Colebrook’s discussion of the two Anthropocenes relevant.

In Derrida’s formulation, the archive is the product of two paradoxical drives: repetition-compulsion (the desire to feverishly gather recollections of humanity in pursuit of a unified trajectory) and death (the desire for self-destruction). It is always destabilized by a force that works to undermine the sense it creates of itself. Colebrook argues that a similar ‘archiviolithic’ (borrowing from Derrida) force marks the articulations of the Anthropocene – a concept that requires us to return to our own traces in the Earth’s strata to feverishly construe a geological image of humanity, readable by a future that will have no readers:

Strictly speaking we cannot know the world as it will be without us, but we can – from examining the archival traces of an inhuman past – proceed as if we could imagine a world that would continue in our absence. It would always require a concrete fragment of this world, lived as fragment, to enable us to think beyond the fragment […] to a time in which a different mode of synthesis, beyond our own, might be possible.¹⁰

Here the concept brings to the fore a deconstructive logic akin to the archival: it simultaneously reflects the desire to render ourselves readable and to imagine our own annihilation as condition of its readability.

One of the exhibition’s acclaimed murals, ‘Mushin Market Intersection, Lagos, Nigeria (2016–18)’, is an orthomosaic image made from twenty aerial photographs stitched together, featuring Burtynsky and his crew on a rooftop in one small section (presumably capturing the image via drone-mounted cameras).¹¹ This odd self-reflexivity can be taken as a source both of fascination (demonstrating digital photography’s radical redefinition of spatio-temporal relations and continuity) and of self-erasure. It involves the desire of the photographer to inscribe himself into the image not as an agent of vision but as geological trace, one that the gallery viewers can inspect and study as if looking at fossil-matter in a natural history museum. Such a self-memorializing imagination also lends itself to a concomitant aesthetic: that of the spectacle. In a recent essay Andrew Kalaidjian states that in the age of rapidly evolving post-cinematic technologies:

The increasingly sophisticated technological mediation that drives the discourse on the Anthropocene gives the contemporary age the status of a global spectacle, where the roles of director, producer, actors and audience are ambiguous at best. The Anthropocene is transformed into the physical manifestation of the spectacle’s aspiration to cover the entire globe, as well as the planetary fulfillment of the narcissism that drives endless speculation and reflection on the nature of humanity.¹²

It is easy to think of the diverse post-cinematic materialities and artefacts of The Anthropocene Project, especially in the form that one encounters them in a major gallery exhibition setting, fine-art book, website or film screening, as establishing a kind of narcissistic spectacle. After all, the technologies it deploys take image-capture and reproduction to the next level. The gigapixel imagery is acquired by remote-controlled and drone-mounted cameras equipped with both image and video-capture features, which blur the distinction between still and moving imagery. Google Earth has been reportedly used in location scouting, with the project’s creative team scanning the images of various locations around the world through satellite imagery before actually travelling to visit them. Photogrammetry and specialized software seem to have aided Burtynsky in recreating the sites he photographed in virtual space, to be explored through VR/AR platforms and 3D printed into distinct Anthropocene-aware artefacts. Last but not the least, a mobile app, AVARA, has been created specifically for the viewing of the exhibition’s AR components, including the life-size, photorealistic 3D model of an elephant tusk pile set on fire by the Kenyan government in 2016. This kind of technical mastery is undoubtedly ground-breaking, yet it also adds fuel to the imaginings of the Anthropocene as a kind of spectacle that is the product of technological mediation per se. Art historian Mark Cheetham has gone so far as to suggest that the exhibition put the Anthropocene at risk of simply becoming a brand, one that naturalizes the problems it seeks to depict by focusing on technology and experience rather than the contested meanings of the term.¹³

Cheetham’s critique brings the question back to the tension between archival/humanist and naturalizing/realist imaginations of the Anthropocene. One could argue that the exhibition’s emphasis on technology is motivated by the artists’ and curators’ desire to give the viewers access to the Anthropocene through affective and sensory registers, which is in line with the haptocentric tendencies of realist frameworks mentioned in my introduction. As Colebrook argues, there is a need for realist lenses in the contemporary era, so this approach does not come from a vacuum or necessarily suggest a lack of critical thinking behind the work. Yet perhaps what is missing is a more direct consideration of reality–archive relations (beyond the occasional statements made by the curators or artists), which seem to be at the very heart of the concept that the project wants to popularize. In the documentary extension of the project, these relations especially become questionable. As the cinematic ‘output’ of the project, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch stands aside from the transmedia assemblage with its incorporation of linear narrative elements. These include a sombre voiceover by Alicia Vikander (the Swedish actress’s association with fiction films like Ex Machina – itself exploring the possibility of human extinction in the age of AI-led technology and climate change – immediately gives the film a broody and post-apocalyptic tone), thematicized sections, and recurrent imagery from two locations at the beginning and end of the film, which grant a sense of continuity to the otherwise disjunctive locations and realities depicted in the documentary. The film takes pride in the expansiveness of its geographical scope (as its IMDb page foregrounds), compiling imagery from twenty countries across six continents. However, the cultural–aesthetic bind hitherto sketched out becomes even more of a challenge within this cinematic context.

The selection of locations seems to have been mostly motivated by an Earth sciences-driven logic that wants to identify the most paradigmatic sites for prominent anthropogenic problems: a metal mine in Norilsk is introduced as being located in the most polluted city in Russia, the Gotthard Base tunnel in Switzerland as the longest railway tunnel in the world and therefore the quintessential example for anthroturbation, and Dandora Landfill in Kenya as the biggest dumpsite in East Africa. Yet histories of representation, which heavily troubled cinema and ethnographic filmmaking in the long twentieth century, affect our perception of these sites.¹⁴ In the film, locations from the global South are mostly used for depicting problems related to the urban sprawl and unsustainable growth of third-world cities, while the images from the global North are filtered through a sense of nostalgia. Footage showing people scavenging in the Dandora Landfill or burning tusks confiscated from poachers in Nairobi, for example, inadvertently evokes tropes of African primitivism; sites such as the marble quarries in Carrara, Italy, however, are presented with a reminder that the stones extracted there were famously used by Michelangelo and others, having been mined since Roman times. The operatic music that accompanies references to antiquity and the Renaissance when depicting European hotspots for the Anthropocene seems jarring when no comparable mournful or memorializing reference to culture is made in the African context. Instead there are extended sequences showing Nigerians going about their daily lives, in makeshift houses and boats, or populating a busy marketplace or a Pentecostal megachurch in Lagos, with the focus mostly on just how crowded they are.

Since the film omits any discussion of the disproportionate carbon emissions from the cities it lists, or of how its Nigerian subjects will be among the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, despite their low contribution to carbon capitalism, such imagery fails to acknowledge how the overpopulation argument is a contentious thread in environmental justice debates.¹⁵ Here, and in other moments within the film, the realist aesthetic framework’s claims of decentring humanity fall flat (pun intended), as the ideological baggage and omissions of the colonial histories of representation inevitably burden the film’s archive, haunting it with absences that have left no trace yet still demand acknowledgement. With so many calls for decolonizing the Anthropocene and discussing the climates of history from the social field, realism without a historicizing lens becomes its own archiviolithic force, especially when addressing the humans of the Anthropocene.¹⁶

Anthropocene: The Human Epoch becomes, perhaps unintentionally, an alarmist text. Apart from a brief statement at the end (suggesting that recognizing humanity’s ‘dominant signal is the beginning of change’), it leaves little room for imagining that change, or what adaptations and alternative futures might look like. The root causes of the problem are also left ambiguous and universalized, attributed to the entire species rather than the interplay between distinct political, technological, socioeconomic and geographic factors. Thus the documentary’s audience is configured as a universal subject, expected to have not only the intuitive power to extrapolate from visceral imagery a pathway for countering climate change, but also the political/economic agency to follow such a path, regardless of global structures of inequality. In conclusion, then, there is perhaps room to return to archival relations in film and media studies, especially when accounting for works that engage with the sprawling ecology of transmedia documentary projects and the challenges that their propagation of a twenty-first century ecological realism pose for cinema (including such realism’s wilful forgetting of the question of social justice and marginalized histories). This is not to say that we necessarily need recourse to Derrida or twentieth-century models of post-structuralist theory, which might benefit from rethinking in the contemporary moment, to do that.¹⁷ Rather we can consider what natural-historical thinking and the dominant trend of ecological realism offer to cinema in more nuanced and critical ways, focusing on the entanglements between cultural archives and geological archives; between contested histories, silenced voices, proliferating media forms and carbon-based materialities.

Footnotes