Where the real meets the speculative

For their CDH Artist-in-Residence Enter the Hyper-Scientific art project, premiering at EPFL Pavilions - Pavilion A on March 19, they have used a game engine to create a “sci-fi documentary” entitled Staring at the Sun, which investigates solar geoengineering and the limitations of climate modelling.

To find out more about this project and the research involved, we asked artist Alice Bucknell a few questions:

Documentaries are factual, and sci-fi is fiction, seemingly opposing ideas. What is a “sci-fi documentary” and why did you choose this format?

I chose the term “sci-fi documentary” to describe the film as it’s a bit of a paradox. We think of documentaries as truth-tellers, something that offers an objective and sober analysis of an often complex topic. Meanwhile sci-fi is most commonly relegated to the realm of the fantastical, the otherworldly. By combining field research and ethnographic approaches with a semi-fictional narrative, I am trying to bring these approaches together. The intention is to produce a world, environment, and condition that feels simultaneously very familiar and eerily beyond recognition.

Much of the research, planning, and political/social implications of solar geoengineering—a plan to artificially block solar radiation from entering Earth’s atmosphere—sounds like a work of science fiction. That said, it is also a technology that’s fundamentally tethered to the real. Many countries including Switzerland and the US are already passing laws and developing studies for solar geoengineering, so I’m looking at that point of slippage where the real becomes suffused with the speculative and the speculative also becomes real.

Why did you decide to use gaming technology?

Over the last few years, I’ve been working with game engines as a site for speculative fiction storytelling. A lot of my work hinges between present and future, and with the photorealism of the game engine, it’s easy to create this uncanny space that feels both very familiar but also inexplicably different. In Staring at the Sun, you’ll see a lot of environments that are quite geo-locationally specific, like a Swiss mountain vista or the Southwest American desert, palm oil plantations in Indonesia or the Arctic Circle in Sweden. What ties all of these locations together is the proverbial reach of solar geoengineering technology: like a hyperobject, a term for a complex system that’s too big to pinpoint into any one place or time, its entanglement in the atmosphere affects all corners of the planet.

What is it about simulation that you find interesting?

My interest in simulation comes out of an ongoing and complicated relationship between entertainment and climate forecasting. Interestingly, the game engine is an unexpected bridge between these two fields. In addition to the very real implications of solar geoengineering, Staring at the Sun also looks into the emerging lore of Earth Virtualization Engines: digital doubles or twins of the Earth that are used in cutting-edge long-range climate forecasting. That includes the increased activity of extreme weather events like hurricanes or tornadoes, as well as the more speculative components of solar geoengineering, like: assume we did spray a bunch of particles into the stratosphere, what might Taipei look like in 100 years’ time? Intriguingly, the company NVIDIA, whose graphics cards power the gaming industry, is also using digital twin technology to create the not-so-humbly named EARTH-2: its very own digital Earth twin. I was interested in the semantics of this—Earth-2 is a lot like the ‘Planet B’ of Mars that Musk talks about, while also referring to the Biosphere 2 experiment: these are both attempts to control a planet and environment as a system, largely through future forecasting.

How did you become interested in solar geoengineering as a topic?

Out of all the different kinds of geoengineering that are on the table for debate, solar is perhaps the most planetary. It’s also the hardest to comprehend and the hardest to regulate, because it’s a type of geoengineering that influences the whole world at once. If you release stratospheric aerosol balloons in Las Vegas, that will impact the climate in the Amazon rainforest and the arctic. In this way, I think that solar geoengineering explodes this global/local binary that humans have crafted to understand new technologies. The scale of its impact versus the invisibility of its technology is something that really intrigues me and many of the scientists I spoke with working in that space.

Why was EPFL’s “Enter the Hyper-Scientific” artist-in-residence program the ideal residency for this work?

What drew to me to the Enter the Hyper-Scientific residency, and why I wanted to come to EPFL, is to come to grips with the technical, the scientific, the measurable, and the formal aspects of this research and questions around modifying the earth’s climate systems at a planet-sized scale. I find that if I can work with scientists directly – with climate researchers, with people modeling future climates on earth – then that gives the work a scaffolding of believability that allows me to pursue the speculative elements of this question more rigorously.

I was really interested in splitting the narrative between the US and Switzerland because of the legwork that both countries have already put into modifying the earth’s atmosphere and the ways in which it’s already congealed into these corporate initiatives and marketing strategies. These countries have very different approaches of handling the sublimation of the speculative into the real. The US, in a typical West Coast idealism way, has this real frontier energy. There’s more DIY, tech-bro startups that are doing backyard solar geoengineering, because there’s not any official legislation yet that says they can’t. In Switzerland on the other hand, it’s following a very regimented and well-designed initiative. If you look at the kind of marketing descriptors behind the Swiss corporations, it’s about promising a better world for everybody, whereas the American approach seems to be very individualistic and neoliberal. Both of which are of course problematic, but the inflections of nationalistic discourse made by both countries into this technology felt like an important point to bring into the work, particularly at this time.

Along with exhibiting your work at EPFL, Staring at the Sun will also be part of Mudac’s “Solar Biennale”. What is the Solar Biennale?

The Solar Biennale is an exhibition about coming to terms with the ways in which the sun is simultaneously vital to our world and all life on earth, but paradoxically, because of anthropogenic interventions into the climate, has also become our greatest threat in some sense. As someone who often works between binaries, I am inherently attracted to the complexity, beauty and discomfort of this relationship we have to a celestial body that has sustained human and nonhuman life for time immemorial, and the many ways that relationship has been thrown into jeopardy through human action and our desire for frictionless control without concessions. I think it is a heady and illuminating subject for a show that is asking viewers to imagine alternatives to our current systems of extraction, waste, and human hubris at the planet-scale (and beyond); it’s scary but also suffused with possibilities. That’s a really important matrix of feeling. I’m glad this kind of sun thinking is given the space of a biennale and I look forward to seeing the other works involved.

Staring at the Sun is co-commissioned by EPFL Enter the Hyper-Scientific and mudac - Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts and features a unique format at each location. At EPFL Pavilions, the project will be presented in its full 40-minute length as a two-channel installation that expands the relationship between the speculative and the real, or the scientific and the fictional. It will be part of the exhibition “From Solar to Nocturnal” presented alongside Interspecies Interfacies (part I) by Matthew C. Wilson. At mudac, Staring at the Sun will be shown as a shorter single-channel version, in dialogue with the other exhibited projects.