COMBAT BREATHING: POSTSCRIPTS OF MODERNITY, PART 1
POSTSCRIPTS OF MODERNITY, PART 1 The promises and outcomes of modernity – nation-states and capitalist economies, along with their alienating and extractivist logics and infrastructures – have produced immeasurable catastrophic damage to peoples and living environments across racial and class lines. Throughout their reign, these violent systems have not simply been justified by the values of universality, individual freedom, and liberal secular democracy; they have been produced through them, eliminating and exploiting all that does not measure up or conform to their suffocating parameters. Central to modernity, and to modern discourse more broadly, is the capture of technology as a transhistorical practice and its transformation into a supposedly modern conception governed by the logic of progress. "Postscripts of Modernity" is a film program that engages these catastrophic and violent legacies while demonstrating how film, itself a modern technology, might visualize and facilitate other social relations – in other words, how existing at-hand technologies, currently governed by the reign of capital, might be appropriated and subverted to achieve ends nonsynchronous with their intended uses. The works by Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers, Bahar Noorizadeh, and Nadir Bouhmouch disavow modernity's violence not by returning to an imagined precolonial or precapitalist past, but by insisting on a kind of crude presentism. Their diverse aesthetic interventions within the political contexts they respectively work in embrace whatever tools are currently available within modernity as material for the struggle against it. Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers TAKING BACK THE LEGISLATURE 2020, 45 min, DCP July 1, 2019 – the 22nd anniversary of Hong Kong's handover to China after the end of British Imperial Rule – marks a critical moment in the region, considered, on the one hand, as a celebration of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and, on the other, as an occasion of mourning, anger, and mounting political frustration for pro-democracy groups, eventually culminating in an unprecedented act of social upheaval. As protesters question the effectiveness of months of non-violent demonstrations against the proposed extradition law, a group begins to contemplate a more radical course of action: storming the Legislative Council. Filmed from within the movement by anonymous filmmakers on handheld cameras, TAKING BACK THE LEGISLATURE follows the protesters through the escalating hours of confrontation. The camera captures heated debates among demonstrators over the risks of occupying the building, as well as their encounters with pro-democracy legislators who urge them to reconsider their actions. As frustration gives way to determination, protesters equipped with helmets, masks, and makeshift tools eventually break through the Legislative Council's defenses and enter the chamber. Bahar Noorizadeh AFTER SCARCITY 2018, 30 min, DCP Can computational utopias offer a way out of the techno-capitalist monopolization of the present? In the Soviet Union of the 1960s, cyberneticians imagined computers as machines of communism, and cybernetics as a way to address the mounting difficulties of the planned economy. AFTER SCARCITY follows cyberneticians such as Viktor Glushkov, among others, who proposed that networked computers could overcome the vast bureaucratic inefficiencies of central planning and make possible a fully automated planned economy. If history, at its best, is a blueprint for science fiction, then revisiting these contingent histories of economic technology might open a path to the future beyond the speculative binds of the capitalist order. The work reconstructs this socialist cybernetic history through a deliberately futuristic visual language. Digitally generated landscapes, partly built from LiDAR scans, move through swarms of floating points that trace monasteries and city streets, compressing decades of history into a speculative space. These contingent pasts become prototypes for fictive futures, suggesting that digital socialism was not alien to the communist project, and that computation need not condemn us to the techno-capitalist present. The result is less a conventional historical documentary than a simulation of an alternative technological history with the past appearing as a prototype for a future that never arrived. Introduced by Harris Chowdhary.