Actual Objects Presents: Solstice

Fact is proud to present the world premiere of Solstice, a speculative documentary, directed by Case Miller, exploring humanity’s future relationship to agriculture through four contemporary harvest rituals. “It’s basically working off a very well known provocation in the greater foresight community, which is my other day job, of trying to understand, at a systems level, how large interconnected geo-engineering projects are going to play out in the face of multiple pressures,” explains Miller. “Climate change is the big one, but also population increase, combined with energy systems, all that stuff.” Divided into four chapters, Solstice, Asado, Mayday and Ash Wednesday, the film seamlessly merges documentary-style footage with motion graphics and CGI to take a closer look at four key, in-development projects that address rapidly encroaching climate catastrophe and the effects this will have on global food production. “The initial inspiration for Solstice came from this weird diagram that the UN put out that talked about how food systems on the planet need to double production, even though we’re only going to jump up by about 2 billion,” continues Miller. “There’s some sort of critical mass that’s happening in food production and how we are going to solve that is still a big question that is often on the table. The way in which we decided to explore this problem of food production was through agricultural ritual, essentially: could we use that as a vehicle to start to explore not only the changing of growing seasons, but the implications of new technologies, both in the field and in the lab and the process of automation and our relationship with labor in that sphere?”

Ultimately, though the sounds and images in the film could be interpreted by some as dystopic, Miller contends that Solstice is an inherently optimistic piece. “I think the point is that it persists,” he says. “These rituals are essentially a sense-making technology in and of themselves. You take the unknown, you input it through a ritual, it comes out as a known, it now sits inside our cosmology. Through ritual practice, regardless of what happens, we will continue to persist and make sense of a world as it changes and that will help us to adapt. Mitigation is not the solution, adaption is the solution.” The film’s laser-eyed focus on the kind of world it is possible to build highlights the spaces in which the human spirit rises out of the machine, gesturing towards the potential humanity has for using automation and machine learning to find a sustainable way to live. It’s this kind of world, in which computers, trees and genome sequencers are all understood as forms of natural technology, that Actual Objects is interested in building, too.

For more information about Actual Objects you can visit the studio website and follow the studio on Instagram.

Solstice Credits:

Director – Case Miller
Producer – Liam Young & Actual Objects
Editor – Rick & Claire Farin
Music & Sound Design – Rick Farin & Theo Karon
Narrator – Masha Tckachenko, Elaine Kim
Translations – Julai Marfin, Juan Rincon, Nicholas Stephan
Graphics – Jasper Wong

‘Solstice’
Director of Photography – Amanda Ochs
Research Consultant – Duke Pauli, University of Arizona
Special Thanks – University of Arizona, Terra-Ref Project

‘Asado’
Starring – Pedro Ferrazzini
Costume Design – Macarena Sanchez
Research Consultant – Sean Raspet (NONFOOD), Macarena Sanchez
Special Thanks – Bernd Fruhberger, UC San Diego, NANO3 Laboratory

‘Mayday’
Starring – Jeremy Hartley & Cole Daly
Altar Design – Georgianna Chiang
Altar Animation – Emma Berliner
Director of Photography – Noah Deats
Research Consultant – Jan Padios

‘Ash Wednesday’
Starring – Mishel Prada & Teo Lynch
Costume Design – Kate McNee, Macarena Sanchez, Lena Pozdnykova
Robot Choreography – Curime Batliner
Director of Photography – Noah Deats
Research Consultant – Sonia Lo, CROP ONE

Special Thanks – Alexey Martin, Macarena Sanchez, Benjamin Bratton, Ben West, Alex O’Flynn, Jessie Hill, Juan Rincon, Pedro Ferrazzini, Jeremy Hartley

Made With Support From – Southern California Institute of Architecture, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Fact

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