Star­ing at the Sun

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This 3D science fiction docu­ment­ary delves into solar geoen­gin­eer­ing: the large-scale modi­fic­a­tion of the earth’s climate systems by manip­u­lat­ing the influ­ence of the sun. Giving voice to both human and non-human actors across vari­ous loca­tions world­wide, it exam­ines ongo­ing research projects enabled in part by advances in compu­ta­tional power. It invest­ig­ates innov­at­ive tech­no­lo­gies that redefine our rela­tion­ship with the planet while blur­ring the line between real­ity and fiction.

As human­ity enters a new era of climate engin­eer­ing, Alice Buck­nell creates a recurs­ive narrat­ive by embra­cing the para-fictional and para­dox­ical nature of science fiction docu­ment­ar­ies. Using soft­ware commonly employed in video game design, they craft a narrat­ive that blurs the lines between fact and fiction to explore the porous bound­ar­ies separ­at­ing current tech­no­lo­gical advances from future imagin­ar­ies. They exam­ine how these bound­ar­ies redefine our rela­tion­ship to the world. What happens when the map becomes the territ­ory? What happens when a complex envir­on­ment is reduced to that which can be modelled to become a supposedly control­lable entity?

In the version of Alice Buck­nell’s work shown here, we witness the confront­a­tion between Seth, the fictional CEO of the star­tup Selling Sunsets, and Derecho, a real super­com­puter from Wyom­ing currently running simu­la­tions to determ­ine the feas­ib­il­ity of solar geoen­gin­eer­ing. From the North Amer­ican desert, Seth sells small doses of sulfur to be injec­ted into the atmo­sphere via helium balloons, a solu­tion he argues is effect­ive and cheap for mitig­at­ing climate change. Oppos­ite him is Derecho, located in vast forests, running Earth Engine, a virtual carbon emis­sion-control programme direc­ted by the planet itself. Bored by the perfect resol­u­tion of this digital twin, Derecho uses its avail­able memory to imagine what it cannot calcu­late, getting lost in the clouds by zoom­ing into infin­ity. These clouds, perfect fractals without scale, resist their model­ling.