Hantu Yang Bertransformasi Menggurita

product of technological mechanism from a measurable apparatus. The politics of tenacity of non-Western countries shift the use of the camera to serve its opposite functions, to disregard orderliness. The systemic structure only remains in the camera equipment and on the screen since they were born from the womb of technologism. The concept of imitating reality gets increasingly destroyed by the masters of image circulation, up to its limit.

So, What Did the Filmmakers Do Before the World Shift Back into Twilight?

This years’ selected films reveal that the attempts to reproduce reality have taken a role in investigating the form-making units of the civilization. Film has become a method to prove to the public that the current system has never been separated from the past crimes of its rulers, which continue hitherto.

They present ideas of the global criminal investigation. If no science can thoroughly investigate the crimes, it seems that film, and its playfulness, takes charge of its agency through its freedom to reveal the darkness of (past) crimes. Assuming this pandemic as an apocalypse, then it is far too difficult for us to pinpoint the cause since the past has turned into darkness. As human’s desire to leave traces of memory in the form of images, the film’s desire is to seek what is in the dark. Before the civilization met its twilight zone, it is as if cinema must bear its duty to conduct forensic work upon civilization.

Therefore, civilization becomes both the corpus delicti and the crime scene at the same time. The filmmakers construct signs as evidence to direct our perceptions to see a crime that had been committed. This construction reveals a modus operandi as a background of the crime. In its ways, a film can connect our perception to identify the perpetrator, victim, and witnesses from the crime of civilization.

It turns out that the chronology of events in the history of civilization brought us to this situation. It has forced us to sit in our homes, throwing ourselves into a network of interconnected worlds as a community of binary data that is ready to be computed into our artificial selves.

After the civilization has met its repeated destruction, tomorrow, we might have to build a new one from the ground by using the collections of ‘the last photographs before the apocalyptic tinge in the horizon’.

Lenteng Agung, 26 October 2020

KOMPETISI INTERNASIONAL 01

Luthfan Nur Rochman

Selamat datang di era Anthropocene! Capitalocene! Plantationocene! Cthulhucene!1

Dalam menavigasikan zona temaram, kita harus rela kusut di dalam silang sengkarut benang cene-cene itu. Pasalnya, semenjak kapal Vasco da Gama dan Christopher Colombus berhasil sampai di dua India, goncangan terbesar bagi

1.  Anthropocene adalah istilah geologi untuk menyebut era di mana manusia menjadi daya pengubah geologi yang masif. Istilah ini diperluas menjadi wacana transdisipliner, utamanya ekologi, yang menggugat eksepsionalisme manusia. Teoritikus menggugat penggunaan Anthropocene karena dianggap terlalu luas dan tidak menunjuk ke penyebab langsungnya. Maka muncullah istilah Capitalocene (jejaring kapital sebagai pengubah), Plantationocene (jejaring perkebunan cash crop sebagai pengubah), dan Cthulhucene (Cthulhu=makhluk bertentakel, tawaran Donna Haraway, untuk melihat era saat manusia dan non-manusia berada di kekacauan yang kompleks sehingga manusia perlu mengakui agensi non-manusia untuk bersama-sama keluar dari era ini).