Staying proximate with::

Anthropocene as ruins of modernisation.

Methodological approach::

Cinematic footage and music as post-qualitative inquiry.

Main concepts::

Hyperobject, ANT, Anthropocene, proximity, rhythms, and repetition.

Tips for future research::

Using cinema as a method for structuring an incomprehensible world event.

Envisioning the Anthropocene presents a major dilemma of proximity. The vastness of its spatiotemporal dimensions renders it an incomprehensible phenomenon that cannot be perceived as a single scene. Therefore, it is difficult to recognise the relation between the geological -cene and the individual humans in a society. Whilst -cene refers to time, a scene has a spatial orientation. A scene, depending on the translation, indicates either the passive viewing or active shaping of the land. Antropo(s)cene therefore emphasises the spatiotemporal conditions caused by humans. This chapter presents a post-qualitative inquiry into how cinematic representation and interpretation may bring into close proximity an extensive phenomenon, presenting it as an approachable and comprehensible world event. Methodologically, the interest lies in if and how a cinematic inquiry may serve as an actual method of abstracting vast phenomena into perceivable form. The inquiry is contextualised by an experimental documentary film called Koyaanisqatsi—The world out of balance (Reggio 1982). The film utilises timelapse and slow-motion filming techniques to detect and form patterns from the masses of humans moving within societies and the forms humans impose on the landscape by their architecture, infrastructure, mobility, information technology, and entertainment. The scenic quality of the Anthropocene’s appearance in our mundane lives is situated against a musical soundscape of repetitive phrases and shifting layers, the patterns that the Anthropocene is composed of. The film, if considered as an artefact, also illustrates a paradigm of the perception of time: a film presented for the first time 40 years ago appears to be timely today, not because history arguably repeats itself but because geological epochs generate slowly yet constantly. Rather than presenting an artistic interpretation or critique of the film itself, this work considers Koyaanisqatsi a cinematic inquiry into proximity that adjusts an incomprehensible mass of events into recognisable patterns and outcomes through intra-textual, self-referential reading. Besides such methodological considerations, the chapter also studies the scenic constitution of the Anthropocene teased out by the film, presenting a question: How our living practices generate, demand, and consume those scenic events and places which the Anthropocene consists of, thus voyaging the ruins in their becoming?

Setting the Stage

The film’s title, a word from the Hopi language, Koyaanisqatsi, emerges from a red line resembling the rising sun from the horizon. Next: a close-up of anthropomorphic figures on a canyon wall. Slow-motion space rocket launch. Dust, steam, or smoke rising to the sky like incense. Explosions breaking down solid rock, heavy machinery pouring out black exhaust, all accompanied by dark musical notes. Iron forged in slow motion, nuclear bomb explosions in the shape of mushroom clouds. Sunbathing next to a power plant; the high-pitched voices of a choir. Aerial footage of canyons and mountains showing the sequence of rock layers under erosion, archived and exposed geological time, a scene of -cenes. The natural striation of rocks, their grooves and ridges, and dry river canyons repeated in the striated city infrastructure. The sky reflected in the glass and steel walls of the skyscrapers, the eternal and boundless captured in the geometrically precise forms of the windows. Images of power grids augmented by the sound of organs. Factories and roads, a power plant with its cooling basins, a network of artificial lakes with geometric precision. From an aerial point of view, it all follows the same structure as printed circuit boards and microcircuits, the small metallic buildings connected by lanes on flat, green ground. A mundane view of car queues followed by an endless line of tanks, the forerunners of war. A fighter jet filmed from the air, camouflage imitating the shapes and colours of the land, and a shiny passenger plane on a runway, departing from or arriving at an unknown destination.

These pictorial flows and segments are completely interwoven with music. Patterns, loops, scales, and tempo compose what is seen and heard, present in the audio and the visuals. The notes and the movement on the screen are in sync, a rhythmic constitution developing from the breaths of the choir, brass instruments and the (electronic) organs. The music plays whilst the cars slide up and down on the screen like bubbles of air in the pipes or blood cells in the veins, tiny particles constituting a larger, societal, systematic body. The images are sped up for the inhumane pace of the labourers along the assembly line, dehumanising their movement to match the speed of the automatised machinery, presenting them as one whole, all accompanied by the high tempo of the shifting notes. At times, slow motion reveals the suspicious faces of passerby subjected to the film camera. Dunes are followed by gliding aerial footage above water, creating a steady continuum wherein the sand waves are amplified by the intensified circulation of musical patterns bringing different destinations into proximity with one another. The patterns shift from monotony to monotony, from repetition to repetition, from nature to culture: endless lines of colours, from green to red to yellow, comprise fields of flowers. These tiny pixels form variegated stripes, a striated city space made up of rectilinear blocks and buildings, bright vehicles in vast parking areas, pictures on arcade machines and digital screens—they all begin to form a common schematic picture. Analogical is repeated in the digital, organic in the synthetic, and machinery in the human—patterns imposed on patterns, where imbalance reigns.

Making a (S)cene…

How do the described sceneries of Koyaanisqatsi relate to the ways in which proximity is recognised, expressed, or felt? Proximity, a term denoting nearness or closeness, emphasises a relationship and the measure between two points of reference. This measure is predominantly considered spatial (see Fuller and Ren 2019). Proximity requires being on the scene, physically occupying a space ‘at the moment’ (Huxford 2007, 659). To generate proximity ethics, one has to literally face whatever issue is at hand, to grasp the significance of embodied personal actions and mutually recognise vulnerabilities (Hales and Caton 2017, 96). These characteristics of proximity present a major dilemma in envisioning the phenomenon of the Anthropocene and the role of the highly mobile and consuming inhabitants of modern societies, as not a single act detected in close proximity may alone constitute a geological epoch or even enforce a discourse working with such epic terminology. The same argument is presented by Koyaanisqatsi, constituting the world out of balance from several sceneries, cuts, and lines of music, from different locations and from different moments. To manage such a major phenomenon as the time of man, one may utilise Timothy Morton’s (2013) term ‘hyperobject,’ which aids in trying to grasp a singularity which nevertheless has elusive border, whether it comes to its location in space or time.

Hyperobjects are unbounded, multidimensional, vastly problematic, and too spatiotemporally distributed to grasp cognitively or affectively; they are objects resisting representation in the human imaginary, such as the current climate change crisis (Morton 2013; Frantzen and Bjering 2020, 88; Waterton 2017, 122; Santayana 2020, 9), with its vast variety of environmental, economic, and social aspects. There is also a significant risk in and critique of such a concept as the hyperobject, in that it both orients us towards object-based ontology and may also obscure responsibility and responsiveness (see Frantzen and Bjering 2020, 88). That is, it is an ontology claiming the independent existence of objects without the requirement of human perception, or without being exhausted by their relation to other, also non-human objects—it moves away from anthropocentrism, but it may also obscure the human response and responsibility towards such major phenomenon as (human-driven) climate change and environmental crisis. So, whilst there is a significant potentiality in moving away from a human-centred understanding of the world, it may take the human factor and actor out of the proximity with such potentially disastrous outcomes, as if the human does not matter or has the ability to make a difference.

Therefore, the characteristics of an object situated in time and the agency involved should be clarified. An object, over time, may not be recognised as the same object in whole or part—it may be re-established as something else, another object. In other words, an object, besides its spatial extent, has a temporal extent. The object does not change—rather, different parts of it are apparent at a given time in accordance with the observing agencies involved. A protest march may appear as a process for the protestors afoot, an event for the aloof bystanders, and an object for the aerial helicopter (Galton 2004; O’Sullivan 2005, 752). The same principle could apply to forest clearing: a process for the woodcutter, an altering event in the landscape for the hiker, and a disturbance in the scenery for the tourist viewing the wilderness as an object from the window of a passenger plane. Cinematographic representation techniques may bring forth similar altering perspectives and perceptions of the observed or co-constituted event. Although the perspectives are not simultaneous but presented in a linear order in the film, they can nevertheless be cut into a short sequence, creating an impression of several occurrences taking place around the same event. The event may be constituted from panoramic shots, close and extreme close shots, shots from above and below, and moving dolly- (moving out whilst zooming in), truck- (moving sideways), or pedestal (moving up or down) shots, to mention only some. They not only indicate the partial nature of the filmed object or phenomenon but also the position and point of view in relation to it. These filming techniques and camera angles either claim to present the entire object, a part of it, to look down or up in relation to it, to pull nearer, or to signify a reaction towards the previous shot from another angle.

How, then, do we define and present a phenomenon that, based on multiple characteristics, continuously belongs to the same (hyper)object across a vast spatial and temporal scale whilst still making it perceptible and meaningful? Does an understanding of the object as unchangeable yet with various occurring appearances and revealed parts define it as pre-existing, only waiting to be discovered? This framework would inevitably limit opportunity to act upon any such object, as it may only show itself, not allow any involvement. This proposal goes against the understanding of objects-in-making and the observer effect, performative intra-activity, wherein (hyper)objects are about ‘cutting together-apart’ (Barad 2012, 7), not simply revealed by the observer but actively co-conducted in the becoming of the (hyper)object. The identifying of a certain hyper-(or-other)-object is a matter of naming and the politics of (re)presentation. Scientific discourse may disregard or separate out certain features and include others, decisions often made in retrospect, considering the extent of the temporal axis of the Anthropocene. A film may have the same capabilities, to cut apart and together spatiotemporal differences from footage, to bring the scenes into proximity to the human and to direct our movement towards the incomprehensible in a stream of audio-visual content.

Scape (S)cene

Spatially, the Anthropocene is made here, right under our feet and in the surrounding atmosphere, in accordance with our daily habits in our habitat. The daily habits in Koyaanisqatsi are documented and abstracted as continuous pulsating streams of people, vehicles, and productions lines. Here is also a plural, taking place in various locations whilst travelling to and living in different destinations at various intervals. Therefore, it covers the whole globe. As the here and the everywhere nullify the ability to estimate proximity, the axis must be turned from horizontal to vertical—from spatial to temporal. When temporally addressing the Anthropocene, it is in-the-making, now—it has been in-the-making for a long while—and it is yet to become. The yet-to-become is the right way to address any geological epoch, so long as there is not yet another, more recent epoch to replace it. A geological epoch, a cene, by rule of thumb is named after the imprint of the living beings in the mineralised layer of the soil, recognised in retrospect when dug out of geological history. Yet again, the Anthropocene is an exception, since it is discussed in terms of the present. Rather than being at the beginning or closing of the chapter, we are in the middle, not yet unfolding the epoch but rather enfolding it.

Accordingly, if the Anthropocene is in-the-making, we must ask: by whom or what? The first part of the word, ‘anthropo,’ refers to ‘human,’ whilst the ending, ‘cene,’ means ‘new’ or ‘recent’ (National Geographic 2022). Have we as humans made the cene, the relatively recent time in the temporal proximity of the Earth, into our own scene? Is this the (s)cene of imbalance presented in Koyaanisqatsi, where the physical environment first depicted in its natural condition is then replaced with machinery, infrastructures, and virtuality? If so, this (s)cene is shaped by the geological fingerprint of humankind (or a part of it) and could be ethically staged as a crime scene of mass extinction. How then does the human appear and play out in this (s)cene, and is the stage obscene or scenic?

‘Scenery’ refers to landscape. The word’s ending, ‘scape,’ is often related to ‘scope’ (Online Etymology Dictionary 2022), which in proximity positions the perceiver at a distance, enabling them to perceive something ocularly, to take it as a whole. If one looks closely at that scenery, it is likely to unfold through similar signs the performance of the perceiver themselves. This progression takes us to another understanding of etymology, where instead of ‘scope’ the term historically relates to the words ‘-scap’ (Dutch), ‘-skap’ (Old Norse) and ‘-schaft’ (German) standing for ‘a shape’ (Lorch 2002). Therefore, the landscape is not about the impartial perceiving of the scenery but about shaping it. The Anthropocene is thus perceivable as an Anthroposcenery with ‘anthroposcenic’ features (see Vola 2020). The same applies to tourism: we can evaluate how it shapes, influences, and becomes part of the scene upon which it gazes.

Tim Ingold’s (1993) taskscapes in principle present an understanding of landscape as land shaped through different continuous tasks. The scoped scene is therefore not an empty stage but is rather filled with performers playing out activities ‘scaped’ or engraved onto the land, crisscrossing one another. Whilst the shapes produced by these tasks may appear static in the short term, the actors that are performing them are constantly on the move. It is therefore the movement that captures both the spatial and temporal axis, where a movement in time leaves its traces in space. The movements form a crisscrossing network of acts on the stage, an actor network, following Bruno Latour (2005).

In actor–network theory (ANT), the act does not take place without the stage or the other roles acting upon it. The act occurs amid relations. ANT thus represents uncertainty about the origin and source of action; as far as the ‘actor’ is concerned, it is impossible to address who or what is acting, the assumed ‘authentic self,’ or the ‘social role.’ The actor on stage is never alone: ‘An actor is what is made to act by many others’ (Latour 2005, 46, emphasis original), co-constituting the plot, or the network of agential relations. This stage is not only a cast of human actors but also presents a group of so-called non-human roles. Therefore, the Anthropocene is performed through cohabitation with and consumption of those other actors in this networking scene, adding capitalisation to the term: ANThropocene. ANT emphasises the connections between what is addressed as an individual and what is perceived as a structure, each affecting one another and contributing to the same whole. These crisscrossings form knots and nodes that determine the various agential roles of the plot. Scoping at and deeper into the Antrhoposcene, the plot grows thicker, and there are leads that make this cene appear to be a crime (s)cene.

The victims are buried deep in the ground, a ground archiving the remains of our lost ‘companion species’ (Haraway 2003), those which the anthropos has condemned to extinction, that forgotten ancestry which the anthropos has consumed and exhausted to build for the world the images of man. This self-portrait on the crime (s)cene may appear as an abject object, an abjection that takes no objections, that which by its gargantuan scale escapes any mundane or comprehensible experience and cannot be singled out as manageable object, piling up into a ‘hyperabject’ (Frantzen and Bjering 2020). We have left our fingerprints all over the abject crime scene that we are now investigating. Such a representation of the situation may lead to repulsion and denial—so how to bring the naturalness of decay into intelligible and acceptable form? How can we see time, which is both fast and slow? How can we observe a large-scale event as something that is close by when gaining perspective, setting the (s)cene, requires it to be taken far away? How can we recognise the hurry that causes disaster and the haste that we are in to solve the calamity that rushes at us with the speed of a geological epoch? Here we must alter the proximities: the proximity of space/time, the making of space in time, and the time recorded in space. To perceive the object of inquiry, the object of science, that is on the scale of a hyperobject—the vastness of its temporal and spatial dimensions defeating traditional ideas of an entity—we must take it to the level of the human, to the root cause. If this is the entrance, it may serve as an exit as well.

In Search of Balance…

How do we produce or find an ANThroposcenic object for our inquiry? As timely as the issue might seem, since the ‘cenes’ have a vast temporal span, an attempt at creating an ANThroposcenery has already taken place relatively recently—or decades ago—since Koyaanisqatsi—The world out of balance was already previewed in 1982. The film arguably presents the history of modern society in 1 hour and 26 minutes. It utilises timelapse and slow motion, manipulating the viewer’s perception of time. With these now traditional techniques, director Godfrey Reggio depicts visions of complex systems of production that move at tremendous speed, abstracting and adjusting the connotations between interrelated phenomena and, on occasion, slowing down the movement to capture the expressions of individuals, to capture inclusively also the presence of the document’s makers. Dehumanising the mass and speed of human movement reveals the anthroposcenic in mundane societal life. The ‘episteme [and] aesthetics of distance’ (Vola 2022, 64) are rendered manifest in scaling down individual human bodies, running around like ANTs (see Ingold 2008), enabling one to see the swiftness of slow change. In other words, Koyaanisqatsi may make hyperobjects comprehensible as ANThroposcenery. The multitude of sceneries are composed together by means of minimalism, drawn from repetitive phrases and shifting layers to create an impression at once mechanistic and spiritual on an epic scale. The praise does not come without a downside. The depicturing and pairing of societal life with the aesthetics of environments, organisms, and the geological epoch might naturalise the very same phenomenon that it perhaps aims to criticise. The flow of images and stream of music creates a sense of inevitability, where (hu)man is not causing an unbalance for the environment but is the effect of this environment.

Rather than speaking of cinematic analysis, one could consider experimental films as a cinematic method in the manner of ‘post-qualitative inquiry’ (see St. Pierre 2021), where the film and its cinematic expression are the actual processes of the research. This inquiry does not prioritise the making-of process but the viewing-of revelation. As in ANT, empirical analysis should describe rather than explain (Latour 2005) the (social) forces that do not exist in themselves. A post-qualitative orientation allows for the deconstruction of humanist qualitative methodology, data, analysis, and validity (St. Pierre 2021), as well as the research site for empirical fieldwork as being a particular place (St. Pierre 2019). It can be limitless, immanent, not yet, becoming (ibid.), just as the Anthropocene is slowly piling up: ‘Inbuilt in the method is the way to knowledge, or, more accurately, a certain way to a certain kind of knowledge’ (Vola 2022, 25). The classical understanding of conducting research may not reach the complexity of the posthuman and new materialistic world (St. Pierre 2019), since the becoming world, on its way, cannot be known by the already formalised, systematised, and procedural method or methodology. Yet there is much to be learned from the old (St. Pierre 2021). The old needs to be treated anew, as the future in the making rests in past deeds.

Looping Back…

Analysing that which is currently under discussion as a hyperobject, the Anthropocene, imposes structure and patterns upon an incomprehensible world event by subjecting the documented phenomenon to certain schematic standards imposed by the film frame, such as its width, speed, and musical score. In the case of Koyaanisqatsi, these patterns and structures are composed by and represented through time manipulation merged with rhythmic structuring by the audio. Methodologically, we must recognise the co-composed patterns of music and film footage.

Slow motion, which allows us to pay close attention to a fugitive event, is achieved by high-speed cameras with exposures of less than 1/1,000th of a second or frame rates in excess of 250 fps, the overcranking technique, or by playing normally recorded footage at a slower speed. The time-lapse technique, on the other hand, uses a series of stills or a video camera through which each frame is captured at a slower speed or at a greater interval compared to the speed at which it is played back in the film sequence, producing the appearance of events unfolding at a faster pace than they occurred (Simpson 2012, 431). The stationary camera is focused on something that changes slowly, taking a series of photos over hours that are subsequently compressed into a video with a few minutes of playtime, thus creating a time-lapsing effect (Kelle 2013). This technique captures the dynamism of movement, unsettling the ways we habitually figure things by looking (Simpson 2012, 432). Time-lapse observations render more pronounced the phenomena that, from the standpoint of the observer’s timescale, are too subtle to be noticed (Garzón and Keijzer 2011, 168).

Philip Glass’s music for the film is minimalist, characterised by repeated figures, simple structures, and a tonal harmonic language (Eaton 2008) echoing through the footage with rhythmic repetitions and morphological resemblances. It is without clear beginning or end, only seams between the joining of parts, stitched from moments into eternity. Some clear cultural references are audible: spirituality, for example, in the sounds of the organ and the chanting of the choir. The high tempo in musical loops drives the rat race in the Fordian production lines and traffic. The dominant patterns figured from the film footage and musical score form channels and loops. Just as the cenes are visible in the rocks’ striations as parallel grooves and ridges, the musical score is also a striated structure, on sheet music shifting from low to high notes, where the lines represent and order causality. Even so, in the film the music is not seen but heard—the lines only manifest through the sounds they order. The small variations of the same musical themes correspond with the minimalistic way the film’s visuals compress modern human society into certain repeated patterns of architecture and movement.

How then do we conduct a reading of the past-present-future audio-visualised in Koyaanisqatsi? How does the film audio-visualise the different temporalities constituting the object in flux, the hyperobject? The answer may lie in a self-referential reading, an intra-text that ties both ends of the plot together, from beginning to end, through the patterns and re-emergences that form self-referential loops. An intra-textual reading structures the meaning of the text in relation to the internal contents of the material (see Palmer 2002, 1; Sharrock 2019). The intra-textuality of the film can be traced through its patterns, consisting of textures and structures that produce what is beneath them—or, in other words, that which first meets the eye and later becomes part of a pattern. Patterns do not form when their first particles appear—they do not exist until they are echoed in the next particle, an item that in retrospect shows the earlier shapes and figures repeated in the latter’s discovery, and vice versa, bringing out the repetition, the same partial pattern in the latter. As in weaving, a pattern becomes—rather than is revealed—when certain points of reference are set linearly or lined up. Where a revealing would lean on the understanding of a certain pre-existing order to be found, becoming whilst retrieving from pre-existence instead recognises the possibility, potentiality, or contingency to become into something. Almost like ‘an old encounter that won’t let go or a new one that’s become intelligible’ (St. Pierre 2019, 12), the old becomes recognised as a that when it encounters the new identified as the same. The old or the previous first presents itself as a mere something, such as a cloud, a sand dune, or a wave. It is then readdressed by the following mere somethings as that and more. A wave is a wave, but it shares the same shape as the sand dune: both move and break, but on a different timescale, brought in closer proximity by cinematic techniques and technology.

The patterns produce patterns on patterns and layers on layers. These small snippets of film footage, the variety of scenes, become meaningful through intra-textual reading. With the film footage and the structure of its musical score, they become self-referential characters and characterisations. Aerial images of cultivated flowers link to lines of colourful cars, which are replaced by pixels on a digital screen and customers in a mall. Canyon walls and the sky above are repeated in the towering buildings and captured in the reflective framed windows. They are separate but similar particles, which intra-textually become references to one another, a loop co-constituting a scene of rectilinear modernity, where linearity is separating culture from nature (see Ingold 2007, 152, 155). Watching high speed scenes of production and consumption, footage from factories to shops, is an exhausting and consuming experience.

Closing (S)cene…

As a history-in-writing, you and I have opened the book of sediments and mineralisation to somewhere in the middle. The story of the present forms in retrospect whilst we skim through the earlier layers of pages. Through these imprints we may infer the events, the (s)cenes, that have taken our characters to this point, and we may guess what will come on the following slides that are, as of yet, blank, yet ought to be filled with traces left by the same characters. The scenes become a cene, shifting from moments in time into an epoch. It is in this way that we may encounter our proximity in relation to the discussed hyperobject. The members of so-called modern societies may perceive our own diminishing moment in time, this single, individual, yet repetitive and collective act, as forming and contributing to the pattern that is continuously becoming the Anthropocene: we can determine what has led to the current scene and what is coming after by following this pattern. Whether following the circulation of this reel, this human–machinery, empowers us or drives us to apathy is left as an open question. Nevertheless, although Koyaanisqatsi shows the individual human body as a tiny ant, it is ANT’s role to build the teeming and towering construction before its fall, like the fall of the remains of the exploding Atlas-Centaur rocket at the end of the film.

The Anthropocene is not (yet) at its closure, so neither are these conclusions. My opening for proximity methodology is ANThroposcenery, a post-qualitative reading of the audio-visualisation of the Anthropocene made into comprehensible and perceptive form. It needs to combine scape, scene, cene, and human, shaping these items as individual parts of agential network (theory). Koyaanisqatsi is an old avant-gardist cinematic interpretation of modernity that functions as a cinematographic method by bringing the hyperobject of the Anthropocene into proximity to humanly perceivable experience. The film also serves as a field for research in a post-qualitative manner. In Koyaanisqatsi, the different parts or sides of the hyperobject constituting unbalance are present as repeated patterns made and imposed by human societies on the landscape, appearing on different scales, from macro level city plans to the minuscule level of a microcircuit. They are not perceivable simultaneously but may be captured by the cinema, placing the events, scene by scene, in a linear order across standard pictures, bringing different scales into proximity. It produces a timescale in proximity to the body using time manipulation and metaphorically relates the functions of the living body and the movement of bodies as part of the phenomenon at hand, linking the micro and macro scales. It gives the epoch a human-like feature and physique, presenting it as a cause and a consequence. The film sets a scene by compressing and patterning, by slowing down and repeating sets of visual footage sewn together with a music score as its baseline.

The approach places humans in proximity to the scale of the epoch by imposing patterns on environments, infrastructures, architecture, mobility, and other societal and natural materialities that likewise constitute the human body. Through the circulation and pulse of a collective comprised of a multitude of bodies in similarly circulating and pulsating movement, the film emphasises these palpitations and their directions, sedimented as they are in the geological layer of lost and found opportunities. It links ‘current’ events to the ‘past’ in its intra-textual becoming. Intra-textual reading, in the spirit of post-qualitative inquiry, is looking for visions from the future by listening for the echoes of the past, constituting the embedded becoming from the past, recognising them from the present, and looking forward for the pattern to close when it begins a loop. Koyaanisqatsi thus emphasises our role as audience and performers, the ANTs in/front of the scene: the making of the ANThroposcene.