Asia Bazdireva and Solveig Qu Suess describe their collective practice known as Geocinema as a collective that explores the possibilities of a “planetary” notion of cinema. For this presentation they were presenting their film ‘Making of Earth’, sharing sections of the film, and research that it was based on that they were doing in China.
The first section of the film they showed was shot inside a huge cinema theatre at the newly built campus of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing where they went to visit the Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth in 2018. The Institute hosts the project called the Digital Belt and Road (DBAR) which aims to “synchronize Earth observation data through building an international and centralized platform for various users from researchers to contractors.” The project’s aim of aggregating Earth’s data caught their attention because Geocinema began with the idea that the earth is recording itself. 
The name of the Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth was inspired by a speech by Al Gore in 1998, which stated a “need” for a digital earth, a 3D representation of the planet into which can be embedded vast quantities of geo-referenced data for monitoring climate change. According to Asia and Solveig, Al Gore still consults with the Institute in Beijing, and it will be interesting to see how the climate narratives pair with the techno-political solutions that emerge.
The Belt and Road Region in reality is a major foreign policy for the Chinese state, creating a ‘new’ version of the maritime silk road, with investments into construction across Asia, Europe and Africa to improve trade and exchange of goods. It includes telecommunication lines, oil pipelines, railways, highways and ports. The DBAR intends to install networks of sensors as a sort of “digital nervous system of the globe” to inform about global events, to eventually manage large scale disasters, including environmental challenges due to climate change.
For Asia and Solveig, the cinema globe at the Institute epitomized the aims of the Institute as a totalizing view of the earth as well as being an object of visual culture. The Institute has created a narrative surrounding the threat of climate change as a new enemy, one convincing enough that protests and rallies united people to rise against the threat of global warming. The far-reaching implications of climate change such as air pollution, water scarcity and land degradation as mentioned specifically by Asia and Solveig, represent a threat that does not respect borders, so the enemy becomes a universal one. The Institute’s response to capture as much data as possible, to enable more understanding, facilitates a more comprehensive response, one which aims to slow down the threat of global warming, preferably to a halt.
They were interested in the ideas about how to manage the future through accumulating more data, and how those continue notions of modernity, drawing on ideas of mathematical certainty. In looking to previous work, they discovered 18th Century Jesuit missionaries who developed the “first vastly distributed network for scientific exchange” when they brought modern astronomical and meteorological knowledge and instruments to Southeast Asia. These networks synchronized systems for navigating maritime routes, which became useful for ships and trade in terms of weather forecasts etc. This referred to Sean Cubitt’s work on Geomedia that both mediate the earth and establish a relation between time and value.
Jumping forward in time to 1957 and the launch of Sputnik, Asia and Solveig touched on how this was a significant year as it was when 67 countries came to an agreement that observational data from the satellite would be available to scientists and scientific institutions in all countries – creating a standardized approach that changed the face of science and collaboration. Nowadays there are hundreds of satellites collecting data for monitoring, processing, and archiving. It was also noted that Marshall McLuhan noted that the earth became programmable once Sputnik had been launched, and now with remote sensing still being the dominant technology used for compiling data of this kind, it “carries a historically specific niche, and embedded ideologies that render the earth into a resource.” They also quote Jennifer Gabrys that “sensor-based technologies are not only environmentally located; they also inform and ‘program’ environments, have environmental impacts, and take hold in particular environments, whether for managing or monitoring processes.”
Asia and Solveig also referred to the discrepancy between some countries ability to take part in the DBAR due to not being able to afford satellite stations, the data archives and necessary infrastructure, which leads to what is actually being indexed being politically framed. The DBAR includes projects pitched to them from corporations or individuals, so in many cases, the data for these disenfranchised countries can be included, but only where they are selected to be part of the project. As they describe it, “the political economy behind the scientific exchange reveals the processes of redistribution of global powers.”
The DBAR project also includes monitoring of the north part of the planet, where the Belt and Road trade route can take advantage of melting ice caps to open new routes between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, cutting travel time by up to 40%. There are also opportunities for new oil and gas resources to be extracted to companies in Asia with much greater speed. This will involve collaboration between Norway, Finland and Russia in the polar region, as well as new scientific monitoring under DBAR. Asia and Solveig linked this to how big data enables certain types of infrastructure, prioritizing fiber optics and telecom networks to support smart cities, e-commerce and more extractive activities, predominantly for large companies and their clients. The inevitable linking of capital techniques used to measure the planet therefore make the data inseparable from infrastructural techniques of measurement, feeding back to political modelling across the globe. These also serve to reinforce and maintain the current trajectory of the Anthropocene, the recording and imaging of Earth represents our mastery over nature, conveniently placing the figures who are prominent in recording data as being the only ones who also know how to solve the current crisis.
The clips that Asia and Solveig showed from their film also had a wonderful soundtrack by their sonic collaborator Jessica Khazrik, highlighting the eeriness and illusory nature of the project. By linking significant images of Earth from the Institute in Beijing, to the infrastructure that enables the data collection they focus on and shots of computers performing data analysis, they stated, while quoting their collaborator Jussi Parikka, that the “images are never about things that are seen, but rather they are images of what is being actively measured and calculated.” These images always represent the past, even when it is being used to forecast the future. The visual reality they depict is also about representing the labour that went into creating the operations, as the labour is not easily visible in the creation of the data, that flows through its use to global markets, again, working to perpetuate the Anthropocene.
The culmination of the project therefore is not to look at what is the earth, as recorded and processed as data, but how is the earth. Their work is to look to the earth as something that frames movements between modelling and perception, examining what actually is the real Earth, expanding the notion of the image and the device by which it is recorded as something which is always inherently embedded within the geological and geopolitical infrastructure from whence it came. At the same time, they challenge the idea of what cinema is, and establish Geocinema as recognizing sites of space, the architecture of the spaces, and also the data that construct them.
This was such an enlightening and thought-provoking presentation, and I’d like to thank Asia and Solveig for speaking. I’m really looking forward to seeing where their work moves to examine next!
Image credits: “Making of Earths”, 2020, Geocinema. Still from a video, courtesy of the authors.