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- You are here: Home > THE PHANTOM MENACE
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Online -
Saturday, November 28, 2020 - 19:00
Welcome to the age of cosmic radiation! In 2021 the Sun fell to its lowest point of activity since the birth of science. Compiling stories from the recent past of interaction with cosmic radiation at ever descending altitudes, “The Phantom Menace” is a techno driven stroboscopic climate fiction film written in conversation with various Amazon warehouse workers. Initially inspired by the proposed plans for the U.S government to install their fragile predictive supercomputers deep underground in order to protect them from these upcoming ancient alien invaders, the film uses once costly low-resolution scientific visualizations produced on these supercomputers to speculate on the role of image labour in the subterranean near future. Planes crashing, computers malfunctioning and elections going haywire - these were just the prequel to the future.
Director:
GRAEME ARNFIELD (b. 1991, UK) is an artist filmmaker & curator living in London, raised in Cheshire, UK. Producing sensory essay films from viscerally embodied networked imagery his films use methods of investigative storytelling to explore issues of circulation, spectatorship and history. Research topics have included: the politics of digital networks, the distribution of ecological matter such as peat and asbestos and the adaptive circulation of global and local histories. His work has been screened in different film festivals around the world. Arnfield’s filmography includes the short and medium-length films DEAD DOGS (2020), THE PHANTOM MENACE (2019), PEDIGREE (2018), SHOUTING AT THE GROUND (2017), ASBESTOS (2016; MADE IN COLLABORATION WITH SASHA LITVINTSEVA), COLOSSAL CAVE (2016), SITTING IN DARKNESS (2015). He graduated with a Masters in Experimental Cinema at Kingston University.
Contact:
GRAEME ARNFIELD
Festivals, awards:
Berlinale Forum Expanded 2020 / Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin 2020 / Courtisane, Ghent 2020 / European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück 2020 / Moscow Experimental Film Festival 2020 / Hamburg International Short Film Festival 2020 / Videoex Festival, Zurich 2020 / Sharjah Film Platform, Sharjah 2020 / Antimatter, Canada 2020 / London Short Film Festival 2021
"English artist Graeme Arnfield said that this film was made as part of an investigation process about cosmic radiation, to see how far could someone go with this kind of “tentacles” and the forms technology will influence in the bodies and social media: “A kind of particular thing that was interesting to me at the time was the way it only can be noticed in this kind of effort, in this kind of exit, with radiation it can only be noticed when the damage is already done, or something’s crashed, in this invisible highly charged force. So it’s about kind of always about the way the structure crashes can be managed and also produced in the film. One of those initial starting points was an interview with a technician at a super computer laboratory of sorts who said that it wasn’t a job to kind of stop cosmic radiation from crashing this computers, but to manage and produce the crashes themselves and then kind of imagining and talking about this idea of massive body of labor whose job is to investigate this data, trying to see if it’s been affected by this kind of possible physics and ideas.” (Graeme Arnfield cited by Mónica Delgado, Desistfilm)