Erewhon |
by Charlie Tweed
2025, 00:06:47
Charlie Tweed | Director
Taking this idea as a departure point, the video proposes a contemporary vision of Erehwon, a speculative island, whose surface is made up of vast piles of broken technologies and the traces of a past hyper-technological community. Like the original story, the technology on the island seems to have achieved its own consciousness and whilst the island is littered with remnants there is something else happening below the surface.
The narrators travel down to an old tungsten mine where they find a series of exploratory spaces. Here, rather than technology being used to dominate humans and extract value, it is being reconsidered as a collaborative tool that can offer hope for alternate futures and amalgamations between humans, nonhumans and machines. Various forms of speculative bodies are outlined here, all of them emerging from the waste materials on the surface.
The visual material used to depict the island plays on its own instability, pixelating, merging and disappearing, always on the edge of breakdown, poor images that attempt to rethink the possibilities of the machine and its images using forms of speculative recycling.