localStyle + Joslyn Willauer: Timeslips
single channel HD video, stereo sound; continuous loop
Commissioned by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin as part of the project “Mississippi. An Anthropocene River”.
total duration 39:35, TRAILER duration 2:20
Timeslips creates a poetic frame for considering the state of mind of an interplanetary agronomist—a lens for probing ethical entanglements that include altering the weather to protect vineyards, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, or planetary scale terraforming and biosphere transformation. Mars has a rotational period slightly longer than that of Earth at 24:39:35. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy the solution to that difference is a programmed pause between 00:00:00 midnight and 00:01:00, called the Timeslip—a time outside of chronometric time, and a suspension of the relentless hegemony of the clock that becomes an opportunity for reflection, introspection, and mindfulness. Our fictional protagonist is an extrapolation of efforts currently underway: German researchers are already exploring techniques to grow vegetables in space at Neumayer-Station III in the Antarctic, and a startup in Los Angeles is building massive AI-powered 3D printers intended one day to manufacture rockets *on* Mars. People have intervened with our planet for millennia, with varying degrees of unintended consequences. But faced with the hyperobject of the climate crisis, we find ourselves in the midst of an overdue debate about if, when, and how must we alter Earth’s environment, a project of such scope and complexity paralleled only by the steps necessary to colonize Mars.
How much is too much?
