Together with my previous films FREM and WHITE ON WHITE, POZNÁMKY Z EREMOCÉNU (Notes from Eremocene) forms a loose trilogy. All three works stand on their own, yet also complete and complement each other—discrete pieces of a puzzle, addressing and meditating on the same cluster of topics, motifs, and subjects in formally distinct ways. POZNÁMKY Z EREMOCÉNU, the latest, can be seen as a prologue to FREM, the first film in this post-human “trilogy”. Like a message in a bottle cast out into a sea of data, or an analogue fossil waiting to be unearthed by digital archeologists to come, the work is conceived as a personal project that will be reconstructed an interpreted by my future virtual self. It is a vision from the present of the world to come, one soon to be transformed beyond recognition by technologies we encounter today in merely a state of genesis.
The digital grid offers an actualization of different ways of life and facilitates the cooperation of all sorts of autonomous agents. Some of these agents are considered, in the context of today’s framework at least, to be “non-living“. Buthow do we define this term, “alive“? How can we push the natural limits of our brains and their default cognitive functions to conceptualize the ever more complex world we enshrine ourselves in? What is the fate of “natural” people? What, beyond pure sentiment, establishes and determines the connection between human beings and the greater physical world of minerals, animals, or plants?
Viera Čákanyová
