Transparency Machines explores the relationship between technology and the subtle forms of violence which – based on their invisibility, social acceptance, and apparently harmless incursion into all areas of social life – come to define culture and interpersonal relationships, as well as power structures. From different points of view, four audiovisual programs will question the role of technology, and more specifically technological images, in the digital context and within the paradoxes of the technosphere: visibility and invisibility, transparency and opacity, control and optimization, utopia and dystopia.

Program 4. Techno-eco-cene

An exploration of the influence of technology on the Earth’s ecosystems in the geological epoch of the Anthropocene and its repercussions on programmed climate change subject to the economic interests of the so-called Capitalocene. An essay on e-waste, the materiality of the digital world, and the reuse of obsolete technological material: Africa as the West’s digital landfill (Louis Henderson). A look beneath the surface of the data servers in a former bunker in Stockholm: geology and science fiction (Emma Charles). Biogeography: radical changes in the landscape and ecosystems when there is an imbalance: the extraction of materials in Canada causes climate disasters in certain remote regions of Bangladesh (Ursula Biemann). Human responsibility and the inability to learn from ecological disasters and wars (Basim Magdy). Fukushima in the wake of the nuclear disaster: the invisible and politics of representation by way of a journey through the Japanese landscape iconography (The Otolith Group).

All That Is Solid, Louis Henderson, 2014, 15 min, France, French and English

White Mountain, Emma Charles, 2016, 20 min, United Kingdom, English

Deep Weather, Ursula Biemann, 2013, 9 min, Switzerland, English

The Dent, Basim Magdy, 2014, 19 min, Egypt, 16 mm film transferred to Full HD video (on commission from the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2014), no dialogue, subtitles in English

The Radiant, The Otolith Group, 2012, 64 min, United Kingdom, English and Japanese, subtitles in English

Photo: Deep Weather, 2015 © Ursula Biemann

Acknowledgements
Video Data Bank, Chicago
Lux, Londres
And all the artists