Timeslips_XtendedTrailer (2021)

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

localStyle (Jay Alan Yim & Marlena Novak) + Joslyn Willauer:
Timeslips
2019
single channel HD (1920*1080) video, stereo sound; continuous loop
extended trailer duration 4:33
language: English

•••••••••••••

Too many of us take the availability of water for granted.

Farmers don’t.

People who live in arid locations don’t.

People who live in communities where every day they must transport water to their homes don’t.

If someday people travel to Mars and try to live there, they will confront all three of those situations in extremis and appreciate the irony of having journeyed from a planet where 71% of its surface is covered by water.

In the past, people fought over water, at the personal level, at the community level, at the regional level, at the international level. They still do, in situations ranging from too little water to too much water. Injustices are repeatedly perpetrated by people over other people because of something connected to water.

Timeslips is a thought experiment: the viewer is placed in the mind of a scientist on Mars, whose mission is to bootstrap agriculture in a place where the plenitude of water on Earth is a distant memory. Her recollections take on dreamlike and sometimes hallucinatory qualities. Real and imaginary floods intermingle. Martian dust storms devastate a pumpkin crop. She hears the amplified sounds of underwater insects as the pond they live in is transformed into an Impressionistic waterscape. And she feels the baleful gaze of the multitude of victims of the US Government’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 haunting a field that resembles a cemetary for disused machinery.

Mars has a rotational period slightly longer than that of Earth at 24:39:35. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy the solution to that difference is a programmed pause between 00:00:00 midnight and 00:01:00, called the Timeslip—a time outside of chronometric time, and a suspension of the relentless hegemony of the clock that becomes an opportunity for reflection, introspection, and mindfulness. Our fictional protagonist is an extrapolation of efforts currently underway: German researchers are already exploring techniques to grow vegetables in space at Neumayer-Station III in the Antarctic, and a startup in Los Angeles is building massive AI-powered 3D printers intended one day to manufacture rockets *on* Mars.