#dark mountain

[foliorumviridis]

[strandweaver]

‘Death Stranding’ imagines the eco-horror of our future dystopia

Hideo Kojima’s latest video game is a mindful hiking simulator set in a post-disaster America.

“Tarkovsky, adapting Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 novel Roadside Picnic, created a Zone in which possibilities literally expanded, and slippery ideas of faith, guilt, and desire could be contemplated. Its opening poses two origins for the elusive region: a meteorite or aliens of the “cosmic abyss.” Not that it really matters; the Zone is a vessel for the fears, anxieties, and hopes of those who visit. Other Zone-like constructions with similarly obscure origins have emerged, like the pristine Area X in Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reachtrilogy and Alex Garland’s subsequent adaptation, 2018’s Annihilation. In those works, ecological beauty and horror coexist while time and space take on their own psychedelic properties, posing fundamental questions about the nature of life itself to its own group of travellers.”

“The collective spirit Kojima fosters reminds me of the writer and artist group known as the Dark Mountain project. Its 2009 manifesto Uncivilization writes of the need for figurative ‘bearers, sherpas, guides, fellow adventurers’ in a time of ecocide.”

“Ironically, ecological crisis and its rising death toll has imparted the Zone a new, twenty-first century lease of life. While Stalker and the Chernobyl disaster emerged during the throes of Soviet crisis and the regime’s declining power in the 1970s and ‘80s, the Southern Reach trilogy and Death Stranding function as spaces to reflect on nature’s death, humanity’s destructive potential, and, crucially, our resolve for survival. Crisis generates new questions where old knowledge fails; the Zone offers us a space to work through the tumult.”

“Sam develops a fondness for the incubated infant strapped to his abdomen, which helps him detect BTs in the wild. However bleak, scary, celestial, or downright mundane Death Stranding’s eco-horror becomes, the game is anchored by their connection. At first glance, Sam and BB symbolize the rule-breaking weirdness of Kojima’s Zone where grown-ups rely on strange, bottled babies for survival. But at their core, the duo represent intergenerational responsibility and Sam’s own earthly duty to his dependent. Death Stranding’s most fundamental, surprisingly heartfelt question asks us what we want to pass on: a world of life and possibility, or a darker future entirely.”

[inktr3pid]

Darkness

[yes-lukewinter]

We've been creating the Anthropocene over centuries now. In a much, much shorter interval, we've come up with a complex symbiotic relationship between humans and computing machines that allows us to create models that have changed our consciousness. We look at these interpretations of climate and we see ourselves. All of a sudden we know who we are and what we are doing. All of that happened so quickly. It would be wrong to say that we aren't capable, in light of yesterday's transformation of our understanding, to begin to change the infrastructure of human existence. Yes, it's clear that we're living through a new mass extinction event that we've created, but because our machines can travel even faster than us, the speed and leverage that our prosthetics give us might very quickly enable another way of living.

Richard Powers, interviewed by Nick Hunt, in Dark Mountain Journal issue 15, Spring 2019.

[protoslacker]

I talk about things I’ve learned over the past decade with Dark Mountain: about how despair is not a thing to be avoided at all costs, nor an end state; about how much of what makes human existence endurable lies beyond the reach of the state and the market, unmarked on the maps we’ve inherited from recent generations; about the role that art has played as a refuge for those aspects of reality that retreat from the gaze of those who would measure and price everything, that slip away like deer into the forest; about the hunch that, whatever hope is worth having today, it lies on the far side of despair, where the maps run out, at the margins or hidden in plain sight.

Dougald Hine in The Dark Mountain Project. After We Stop Pretending

[lies]

We are not very good at telling stories about a hundred people doing things or considering that the qualities that matter in saving a valley or changing the world are mostly not physical courage and violent clashes but the ability to coordinate and inspire and connect with lots of other people and create stories about what could be and how we get there.

Rebecca Solnit: When the Hero is the Problem

[shutterbugsankalp]

POST #43: Layers of Mountain ranges uncovered by the deeming sunlight !!

[solarpunks]

Our liberation from the constraints of the seasons is assumed to be progress, but it might be wiser to call it an illusion. All that food in the supermarket is coming from places where the seasons still count. We still live off soil and sun and rain. There is no question of going ‘back to the land’, because we never left: we just stretched the chains that link us to it so far, we lost sense of what lies at the other end. --- This is how climate change arrives, not as a clean case of cause and effect, but tangled up with the cruelties of dictators and the profits made from commodity market speculation, washing up in boats on package holiday coastlines.

How Climate Change Arrives – Dougald Hine - Medium