Andreas Palfinger

MOTHER ARKAH

 

A Filmic Allegory on the Rise and Fall of Ideologies

‘Mother Arkah’ is an 18-minute animated short film exploring a speculative climate-apocalypse scenario and the hypothesis of the posthumanist ideology ‘Bio-Technoism’. The project investigates concepts on prohibiting the ‘religion of growth’, future power structures shaped within the ‘Posthuman Convergence’, AI-driven symbiogenetic evolution and autopoietic architectures.

The film serves as an allegory on mechanisms behind political belief systems, while posing questions about how deep the ‘urge for innovation’ is rooted within us humans and therefore how much humanness our planet can take.

 

A Filmic Allegory on the Rise and Fall of Ideologies

‘Mother Arkah’ is an 18-minute animated short film exploring a speculative climate-apocalypse scenario and the hypothesis of the posthumanist ideology ‘Bio-Technoism’. The project investigates concepts on prohibiting the ‘religion of growth’, future power structures shaped within the ‘Posthuman Convergence’, AI-driven symbiogenetic evolution and autopoietic architectures.

The film serves as an allegory on mechanisms behind political belief systems, while posing questions about how deep the ‘urge for innovation’ is rooted within us humans and therefore how much humanness our planet can take.

The film tells a story set far in the future. To save life on earth after the environmental collapse, a secret research program creates giant living biotopes, a so-called ‘megastructure’, to preserve life until planet earth is habitable again.

The film tells a story set far in the future. To save life on earth after the environmental collapse, a secret research program creates giant living biotopes, a so-called ‘megastructure’, to preserve life until planet earth is habitable again.

The only long-term threat is humanity’s urge for innovation, which inevitably leads to ecological catastrophes and mass extinctions. Therefore, this urge needs to be suppressed through ideology, which is maintained by worshipping a symbiogenetic consciousness and an ideology of ‘pure existing’.

The only long-term threat is humanity’s urge for innovation, which inevitably leads to ecological catastrophes and mass extinctions. Therefore, this urge needs to be suppressed through ideology, which is maintained by worshipping a symbiogenetic consciousness and an ideology of ‘pure existing’.

‘Mother Arkah’ can be seen as a film taking on characteristics of a theatre production, staging and communicating this speculative scenario through four personas and various virtual set designs.

‘Mother Arkah’ can be seen as a film taking on characteristics of a theatre production, staging and communicating this speculative scenario through four personas and various virtual set designs.

A nonlinear approach to storytelling discloses philosophical questions surrounding the conflation of technology and biology, while simultaneously exploring mechanisms behind political belief systems.

A nonlinear approach to storytelling discloses philosophical questions surrounding the conflation of technology and biology, while simultaneously exploring mechanisms behind political belief systems.