Climate change, technology and archiving discourse in webinar

AN online discussion between artists Deniz Tortum and Amy Balkin tackles how the ideas of colonial capture, crowdsourcing, collecting and computationalism inform explorations into preservation and the future.

They will walk the participants into the significant role of technology and archiving at the face of climate change.

Tortum, a Turkish director, screenwriter and multimedia artist, will expound on his work in collaboration with British director Kathryn Hamilton.

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Titled Our Ark, the 12-minute, 25-second digital cinema packaging serves as an essay film on the efforts to create a virtual replica of the real world. This includes 3D models of animals, rainforests, cities and its inhabitants, to archiving as if ecological collapse could be staved off through a digital Noah’s Ark of beasts and objects.

It delves into the conflict of the simulation hypothesis, which argues that we live in an artificial world rather than in reality. The enthusiasm may be explained by the nihilism of the Earth’s current trajectory.

Our Ark, which received the Best Short Film Award at the 2022 Istanbul Film Festival, is currently exhibited at MCAD’s ongoing exhibition Adaptation: A Reconnected Earth. The show proposes an approach to determine the present within the realities of a changed climate, a despairing planet and a recently renewed humanity.

Balkin, an American cross-disciplinary artist, will likewise speak of her project “A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting.” It is a growing amalgamation of materials contributed by residents living in uninhabitable places that may disappear. This may be due to the combined physical, political and economic impacts of climate change such as sea level rise, erosion, desertification, and glacial melting.

As of 2023, it includes pieces from Antarctica, Cape Verde, Cuba, Greenland, Honduras, Iceland, Nepal, Panama, Peru, Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, Komi in Russia and Alaska and New Orleans in the US.

Tortum dwells in film and immersive media. His creations have been screened internationally, including at the Venice Film Festival, SxSW, IFFR, IDFA, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Hot Docs, True/False and Dokufest. In 2019, he was featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.

His latest feature Phases of Matter (2020) received the Best Documentary awards at Istanbul and

Antalya Film Festivals. A researcher at the MIT Open Documentary Lab and MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative, he focused on immersive media.

Balkin’s work combines cross-disciplinary research and social critique to generate ambitious, bold and innovative ways of conceiving the public domain outside current legal and discursive systems.

Hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) of the De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, the lecture will be moderated by Margarita Villanueva, the manager of the conservation laboratory of the Lopez Museum and Library.

The discussion is free and open to the public. It will be conducted online via Zoom on Thursday, May 25, 11 am. Interested participants may register at forms.gle/ VR83SdjPDoBx3ohM8. More information is available via mcad@benilde.edu.ph