Road to Utopia: Working towards an Affective (Poetic) Cinematic Inquiry into the “Ecological Emergency.” (original) (raw)

The research project and essay film Road to Utopia seeks to film changes to the ecology, in poetic or affective cinematic registers, with the aim to evoke an emotional response in the Viewer. Working from the position that fear-inducing documentary polarizes popular opinion, might a poetic and affective mode of visual and aural inquiry offer another method of communicating anthropogenic climate change? The project is focused on late-capitalist human addiction to fossil fuels, and the infrastructure that supports our ever-escalating dependence on oil. The project was filmed over three months, in 2013, from Northern Canada (Fort MacMurray and Edmonton) to Southern California (Palm Springs and the Salton Sea). The presentation will look at three images from the film and attempt to unpack what is affective and/or poetic about them as individual shots or as core samples of temporal space and altered place.