2023

Imaginary Explosions
Episode 3
Artifice

23 minutes single-channel video
2k HDV & 16mm film transferred to HDV; color; sound with captions; audio description version available

video

An explosion of smoke and lights in the darkness with a waterfall of fire from an artificial volcano.

Film Still: Imaginary Explosions, Episode 3, Artifice (2023)

23 minutes single-channel video
2k HDV & 16mm film transferred to HDV; color; sound with captions; audio description version available

Few mortals like us, my dear, have ears to catch the low whisperings that issue in dark hours from rocks. – Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

Artifice stars the only artificial volcano to survive its own eruption: a model replica of Vesuvius from the grounds of an 18th-century German pleasure palace. Gardens as models for the worldbuilding of empires are the subject of this queer cli-fi that mixes facts with speculation. A media archaeology of earth and atmosphere culminates in a dazzling yet foreboding explosion of forms.

Artifice is the third episode in Imaginary Explosions (2018-2023), 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.

Hand flipping a page of an atlas with a stone upon a flat map in the foreground.

Film Still: Imaginary Explosions, Episode 3, Artifice (2023)

Software on a laptop decodes the data from her antenna. One window shows satellite images of cloud movement and another tracks her own movements through the webcam. On the right, radio signals spike up and down on a graph.

Film Still, Sasha sensing with satellites: Imaginary Explosions, Episode 3, Artifice (2023), courtesy of Open Weather Collective

Film Still: Imaginary Explosions, Episode 3, Artifice (2023)

Film Still, Sasha sensing with satellites: Imaginary Explosions, Episode 3, Artifice (2023), courtesy of Open Weather Collective

Preview: Imaginary Explosions, Episode 3, Artifice (2023)

Few mortals like us, my dear, have ears to catch the low whisperings that issue in dark hours from rocks.
– Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

Caitlin Berrigan exhibition Cassandra with a flood in her mouth at JOAN photographed by Evan Walsh

Curtains hang in the background with a large monitor and an oversize amulet in the foreground.

Imaginary Explosions Cosmology Installation View: Cassandra with a flood in her mouth, JOAN Los Angeles, February 4 – April 15, 2023
Curated by Suzy Halajian with Hannah Spears

Photographer: Evan Walsh (2023)

Imaginary Explosions Cosmology, exhibition installation at JOAN Los Angeles (2023)

Imaginary Explosions Cosmology with Vistas (2018), big dumb rocks (2019), Episodes 1-3 (2018-23)
Installation View: Cassandra with a flood in her mouth, JOAN Los Angeles, February 4 – April 15, 2023
Curated by Suzy Halajian with Hannah Spears

Photographer: Evan Walsh (2023)

Imaginary Explosions Cosmology Installation View: Cassandra with a flood in her mouth, JOAN Los Angeles, February 4 – April 15, 2023
Curated by Suzy Halajian with Hannah Spears

Photographer: Evan Walsh (2023)

Imaginary Explosions Cosmology with Vistas (2018), big dumb rocks (2019), Episodes 1-3 (2018-23)
Installation View: Cassandra with a flood in her mouth, JOAN Los Angeles, February 4 – April 15, 2023
Curated by Suzy Halajian with Hannah Spears

Photographer: Evan Walsh (2023)

Film Still: Imaginary Explosions, Episode 3, Artifice (2023)

Film Still, Thomas with the artificial volcano: Imaginary Explosions, Episode 3, Artifice (2023)

Illustrations of the Worlitz park maps and paintings are cut out and laid on top of handwritten script notes.

Research documentation process still: Imaginary Explosions, Episode 3, Artifice (2023)

A person strolls through a long hallway in front of a crystal chandelier, wearing a glowing brass video player necklace, a smart jacket and on oversized collared shirt with long blonde hair flowing.

Film Still: Imaginary Explosions, Episode 3, Artifice (2023)

Research documentation process still: Imaginary Explosions, Episode 3, Artifice (2023)

Film Still: Imaginary Explosions, Episode 3, Artifice (2023)

The filmmaker stands behind a camera beside lights and other tripods in the ornately carved, yellow room of the Sans Souci Palace. The sound designer squats beside her. Both are masked and look into the lens.

Process Still: filming Artifice in the Voltaire Room at Sans Souci Palace, Caitlin Berrigan & Samuel Hertz

Featuring

Dr. Sasha Engelmann

is a geographer exploring interdisciplinary, feminist, and creative approaches to environmental knowledge making. She is the author of Sensing Art in the Atmosphere (Routledge 2020), and a Senior Lecturer in GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway University of London.

Dr. Thomas Love

works between contemporary art history, German studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race theory. He is working on a book, titled Queer Exoticism: Strategies of Self-Othering in West Germany, 1969-1994.

Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga

works between the realms of art, architecture, and urban research to explore the possibilities inherent in the intersections between social and physical spaces.

Der Vesuv von Wörlitz (1794)

Credits

Director, Writer: Caitlin Berrigan
Original Composition :

Artifice (2021) Composed & performed by Caitlin Berrigan; additional production, mixing & mastering by an3 van der Kuit; with composition consulting by Yun Ingrid Lee
Original Film Score: Samuel Hertz
Camera: Caitlin Berrigan
Camera for 16mm: Siska
Sound Design & Mix: Samuel Hertz
Filmed Locations: Schloss Sanssouci Potsdam, Schloss Solitude Stuttgart, Wörlitzer Park Dessau (Germany)
Audio Descriptions: written and performed by Elaine Lillian Joseph
Audio Description Consultant: Thomas Reid
Editing Consultant: Aleesa Cohene
Colorist: Asa Fox
Additional Music:

L’île de Gorée, Iannis Xenakis (1986)
Additional Imagery and Footage:

Topographical map of Schloss Solitude (1777); Open Weather live satellite séance screen captures courtesy of Sasha Engelmann & Sophie Dyer (2020); NOAA satellite animations courtesy of NASA and Harry Dove-Robinson & Heidi Neilson, Here GOES Radiotelescope (2021); Geological map of Germany, Federal Institute of Germany for Geosciences and Natural Resources (1993); Mundus Subterraneus by Athanasius Kircher (1664); Campi Phlegraei (Treatise on the Flaming Fields) by Sir William Hamilton & illustrations by Pietro Fabris (1776); Perspective of the Vesuvian Machine by Sir Hamilton by François de Paule Latapie (1776)
Quoted Texts:

The Italian Journey, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1786); Tales from Ovid, Ted Hughes (1997); The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag (1992)
Supported By: NYSCA-Wave Farm Media Arts Assistance Grant; Academy of Fine Arts Vienna PhD-in-Practice Program Doc-Funds; City of Vienna Artist Grant; Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant; Akademie Schloss Solitude