The wild SF of Stanislaw Lem, the cartoon version of the 4-day week, & urban psychedelia. A/V for the soul
Our semi-regular lantern show of a/v delights, spilled from the cornucopian horn of the creative web. The rough theme this week is super-hard imagining of alternative and future worlds.
We begin with this from Aeon (embed is above):
The Polish writer Stanisław Lem (1921-2006) is perhaps best known for his novel Solaris (1961) – a visionary work of ‘first contact’ science fiction later adapted for film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972, and again by Steven Soderbergh in 2002.
However, as this video essay explores, Solaris represents just one small piece of Lem’s sprawling and prolific career as a writer of both peculiar and imaginative works of science fiction, and of speculative works of philosophy that anticipated many of the technologies and anxieties of the modern world.
Adapted from an essay for the London Review of Books by the US writer Jonathan Lethem, Five Lems distills a long career into five distinct categories.
In doing so, it explores Lem’s insights into the human condition, as well as how his imaginative ‘fairy tales and folk tales for the future’ offered an antidote to the ‘technocratic triumphalism, manifest destiny, libertarian survivalist bullshit’ of American-dominated mid-20th-century science fiction.
From Creative Review:
A slow drumbeat of enthusiasm for the four-day working week has been growing for some time now, and this week the UK sees one of its largest trials yet as over 3,000 workers at 70 companies begin a six-month pilot where they work less days for the same pay.
The premise is that we can work for 80% of the time but generate 100% productivity, thus in turn giving workers a better quality of life, and have less of a detrimental impact on the planet. Organised by 4 Day Week Global, the pilot features a range of businesses, and inspired director Ian Pons Jewell to create the short film Change The Week.
The film features bespoke animations from artists Alex Jenkins, Amanda Bonaiuto, Pia Graff, Dal Park, Cheng, Matteo Dang and Juan Cartoons. For director Pons Jewell, the way we approach working life is a subject close to his heart.
“During the first lockdown, I saw previously rigid, large corporations suddenly accept their employees working from home,” he says. “A trust that was previously non-existent was ushered in, for the continuation of these corporations’ existence. This made me think it was a chance to bring in other changes to engrained 9-5, Mon-Fri work culture. It seemed like there was a chance to get change made to ‘the week’.
“But reading research isn’t something many of us like to do. So an animation felt like a great way to distil all the research into an engaging piece that could be shared and digested much more.”
From Vimeo’s blog:
This week’s Staff Pick Premiere comes from Adrien Merigeau in the Oscar-nominated “Genius Loci” – a psychedelic, fantastical journey taken by a young woman as she explores an ever-evolving cityscape.
With style for miles and a range of 20th-century modern painting influences, Merigeau wows with every frame and detail. Environments are consistently reimagined and contextualized through new angles, and color works in a stark way as it plays alongside white space. A cup of water turns into a river, a rogue carpet doubles as a trampoline – Merigeau stops at nothing to build a bonafide fever dream.
Merigeau explains the genesis for the film as processing trauma he’d experienced for himself and seen through friends, trauma that felt like “a constant flow state.” After squatting with artist friends in Paris during 2015, Merigeau recalls, “What really struck me was how much the city could feel like nature when you experience it at night through abandoned spaces.
“The nature/culture, order/chaos transcendence that became the heart of Genius Loci linked up with other interests of mine, like fairytales, experimental animation, and contemporary music.”
With a runtime of about 16 minutes, and informed by the wealth of his experiences and others, Merigeau elevates the short-form animated space with this unmistakable articulation of the abstract.