Imaginary Explosions
Episode 1
Eyjafjallajökull

The first episode of Imaginary Explosions centers on the 2010 eruption of the volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, in Iceland, when the deep time of volcanic activity ruptured into the space of global air travel. Timescales and affective embodiment shift across geological time, snail time, human time, and the rapid pace of the news media cycle.

Imaginary Explosions (2018-2023) is a speculative cosmology that blurs research science with art and fiction. The episodic series centers inhuman animacies and an alliance of transfeminist scientists who cooperate with the desires of the mineral earth to simultaneously erupt all volcanoes. Improvised with real-life scientists and media researchers, the films follow members of the network as they traverse geological sites across place and time and attempt to divest technoscientific instruments of their corporate and military infrastructures of power.

The Imaginary Explosions cosmology translates aesthetic forms of communication across sensory modalities while being in relation to inhuman alterities and non-normative bodies. How can we understand and interpret the inhuman world? How can we practice other ways of being in a body? Focusing on communication with geologic subjects through technologies and mutual alliances, the cosmology explores how human and mineral subjectivities are entangled, emphasizing moments when the earthly asserts its agency in the political sphere.