Renaissance Filmmaker Godfrey Reggio On His And Philip Glass's KOYAANISQATSI Trilogy And The Global Internet
... "What better place to raise these and other questions that on/in the global Internet? This high-tech nervous system, this digital alchemy, this synthetic organism that is changing the world seems ideally suited for such a task. If entering the medium questioned to raise questions seems contradictory, this is because it is. To freely embrace this contradiction is the motivation for this site.
Like the oxygen we breathe, technology is the big force, omnipresent and inescapable. It appears as a force of nature. Who can question nature or acts of god? Something this prevailing, this present, is normally taken for granted. Only the heretic could dare to be so blasphemous.
Could it be that our language is no longer capable of describing the world in which we live? Perhaps, the world we see with old eyes and antique ideas is no longer present. Do we inhabit a technological universe the laws of which are unknown? The world we see is being left behind.
A new untellable world is unfolding. As the human race accelerates into the twenty-first century, we enter a virtual, digital environment, a world where far and near, past, present and future are simultaneous realities. The human center of gravity seems to be blasted into the void. Our bodies are less central to our lives, our physical involvement with an increasing synthetic world grows less. Have we arrived at an unthinkable post-natural and post-human condition? Does this singular event offer to all that will, the extraordinary opportunity to re-name the world in which we live? Are we, appearing to be human, already the cyborgs of the fiction of science?
These are the questions that motivated KOYAANISQATSI, the other films of the Trilogy and, hence, the website that we offer for your participation, inquiry and dialogue. This is our beginning effort to supposit these films into the web, to mainline the QATSI Trilogy [by Mr Reggio and composer Philip Glass].
In closing we offer two reflections that articulate the point of view of this site: one from Elias Canetti, a Nobel Laureate for literature; the other from French philosopher and writer Jacques Ellul.
A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality.
- Canetti
"...The crisis that we are approaching today is of yet another order. For it entails the transition, not from one form of society and power to another, but to a new environment...The present crisis...is a total crisis triggered by transition to a new and previously unknown environment, the technological environment....The present change of environment is much more fundamental than anything that the race has experienced for the last five thousand years."
- Ellul
Source: Filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and The Institute for Regional Education
http://www.koyaanisqatsi.org/aboutus/aboutus.php
Hopi Second Mesa (Arizona, North America)
Photo credit: jwarfiel Stonepoems With thanks.
http://www2.arch.uiuc.edu/Faculty/jwarfiel/
stonepoems/webpages/stonepoems_tiny4.html
Like the oxygen we breathe, technology is the big force, omnipresent and inescapable. It appears as a force of nature. Who can question nature or acts of god? Something this prevailing, this present, is normally taken for granted. Only the heretic could dare to be so blasphemous.
Could it be that our language is no longer capable of describing the world in which we live? Perhaps, the world we see with old eyes and antique ideas is no longer present. Do we inhabit a technological universe the laws of which are unknown? The world we see is being left behind.
A new untellable world is unfolding. As the human race accelerates into the twenty-first century, we enter a virtual, digital environment, a world where far and near, past, present and future are simultaneous realities. The human center of gravity seems to be blasted into the void. Our bodies are less central to our lives, our physical involvement with an increasing synthetic world grows less. Have we arrived at an unthinkable post-natural and post-human condition? Does this singular event offer to all that will, the extraordinary opportunity to re-name the world in which we live? Are we, appearing to be human, already the cyborgs of the fiction of science?
These are the questions that motivated KOYAANISQATSI, the other films of the Trilogy and, hence, the website that we offer for your participation, inquiry and dialogue. This is our beginning effort to supposit these films into the web, to mainline the QATSI Trilogy [by Mr Reggio and composer Philip Glass].
In closing we offer two reflections that articulate the point of view of this site: one from Elias Canetti, a Nobel Laureate for literature; the other from French philosopher and writer Jacques Ellul.
A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality.
- Canetti
"...The crisis that we are approaching today is of yet another order. For it entails the transition, not from one form of society and power to another, but to a new environment...The present crisis...is a total crisis triggered by transition to a new and previously unknown environment, the technological environment....The present change of environment is much more fundamental than anything that the race has experienced for the last five thousand years."
- Ellul
Source: Filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and The Institute for Regional Education
http://www.koyaanisqatsi.org/aboutus/aboutus.php
Hopi Second Mesa (Arizona, North America)
Photo credit: jwarfiel Stonepoems With thanks.
http://www2.arch.uiuc.edu/Faculty/jwarfiel/
stonepoems/webpages/stonepoems_tiny4.html
posted by Garth Trinkl at 1:49 PM
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