We are delighted to announce that Advanced Urban is holding a special research webinar with Geocinema – Architectures of Planetary Cinema on Friday 10 July 2020, 2pm BST. Geocinema is a collective by Solveig Suess and Asia Bazdyrieva that explores the possibilities of a ‘planetary’ notion of cinema.

This is a free event requiring registration.

Participants will be invited to read, in advance, materials provided by Geocinema, which will be sent a day before the webinar. On Friday 10 July 2020, 2pm BST we will convene a 90-minute long online discussion with Geocinema, respondents including Jim Hobbs (Artist in Residence – University of Greenwich) and Prof François Penz (Professor of Architecture and the Moving Image, University of Cambridge) followed by a Q&A.

To register, please send a note with your name and affiliation to Emma Colthurst emma.colthurst@greenwich.ac.uk

Architectures of Planetary Cinema: Drawing on their recent fieldwork on the Digital Belt and Road Initiative in China and their subsequent documentary, Making of Earths (2020), Solveig Suess and Asia Bazdyrieva will speak on the techniques of earth sensing, vast resource extraction, and present-day demands aimed towards battling a future of climate change. While simple sets of data are accrued from geological to techno-political formations, they translate into the many versions of Earths. These large-scale imaging operations feed back and circulate across scales of the body, the apparatus, the landscape. The webinar will diversify from the method of Geocinema, which is to examine infrastructures of earth-sensing data as forms of cinema.

Bio: ‘Geocinema’ (Solveig Suess & Asia Bazdyrieva) is a collective that explores the possibilities of a ‘planetary’ notion of cinema. The surface of the planet is documented in ever greater detail with the increased proliferation of images captured by individuals and technologies today. Their research includes reflecting on both the architecture and infrastructure behind this network, which to them constitute a decentralised apparatus of moving-image. Various technologies contribute to this collection of data on different scales, whilst also situated at an intersection between corporations and governments, who feed into and extract from this widely dispersed network of footage. In addition to the political implications of surveillance, from an individual, global, and astronomical perspective, they are also interested in how this vast constellation of visual, auditory, and geographic data is increasingly utilised in predictions about the future. Throughout their practice, tensions are revealed between the relationships of the totalising and the fragmented, the disembodied and the situated, as well as past and present-futures.

More details about the event can be found at: https://www.advancedurban.org/webinar-geocinema