Art historian Asia Bazdyrieva and collaborative partner filmmaker Solveig Suess form the duo known as Geocinema. The two met while at The New Normal, a speculative urbanism think-tank at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design. Prior to this, Asia studied analytical chemistry at the University of Kyiv and art history at The City University of New York as a Fulbright grantee.
The Geocinema project considers planetary-scale sensory networks – cell phones, surveillance cameras, satellites – as a vastly distributed camera, each running through their own sets of scales and temporalities while producing terabytes of raw data. Together they ask – if this camera is framing a type of ‘geocinema’, how can ‘geocinema’ be a mode of seeing otherwise?
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During the fellowship, Bazdyrieva and Suess have been developing a method aimed to trace techniques of sensing used for planetary scale computation. These sensory networks – orbital bands of satellites, geosensing arrays, surveillance cameras, and billions of cell phones – sense fragments of the earth through their own temporalities and scales. By being attentive to how data is identified, collected and transmitted, this method aims to track these as decentralized editing processes, where they each construct stitched representations of the earth.
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