KOYANNISQATSI (Hopi: "life out of balance")

I am currently reading and researching in regards to the consequences of "civilisation" and particularly "technology" within that. Technology, as you may think, is not at all neutral "tools" or "devices" but is instead understood, much like its parent civilisation, as the imperative and coercion to live a certain life. Civilisation and technology, that is, create a path and drag us down it. With consequences.

As part of this research I stumbled upon an interview with the director Godfrey Reggio most famous for his 1982 experimental film "Koyannisqatsi" which is NOT an environmental film but a film exactly about technology and how it affects, moulds and shapes life. This film has no plot or narrative (and only a few words right at the end as in the accompanying photo) but the effect of watching it, to me at least, is that the way life has come to be in its modern iteration is quite simply crazy and absurd, something which creates the inevitability of death, destruction and ill health but about which almost no one seems to care because we have now all been conformed to believing that society is a machine we must keep working.

Utter madness.

#ecology #technology #environment #politics #society #civilization #climate