Extra-Terrestrial Ecologies (Retroflectors: the astronaut, the robot, the alien)

Available On Demand, throughout the Festival

General admission: $12 | $9 (conc). For Festival Passes and concession information, click here.

This is paired with Radically EFF'd: Through the Extraterrestrial Lens. Your ticket gains you access to both the film and the talk, as well as a companioned short film, The Mirrored Message.

Austrian video artist Ralo Mayer returns with Extra-Terrestrial Ecologies, a film essay told in intertextual vignettes. This experimental piece explores the intersection of cinema, technology, space and ecology, and looks at our complex cultural engagements with environments near, far, and imagined.

ET, Blade Runner, Wall-E, and The Martian – along with other pop culture exemplars of space iconography – are deployed to explore our complex cultural engagements with environments near, far and imagined, and the limits of perception. Following rave reviews at last year’s Festival screening as part of our Experimental package, EFFA is thrilled to give audiences another chance to see this irreverent masterpiece.

Why EFFA loves this...

"This is such a fun watch. It’s essentially an essay film that goes into Donna Haraway territory pondering what it is to be human in the midst of technology, nature and outer space, mashing up science fiction and science, the culture of imagination and art with reality around us. 

It’s a perfect film for an environmental film festival because of its cineliteracy and the ways in which it deliberately considers film culture within the context of ecological thinking. If you’ve ever thought that the way aliens, technology and nature are covered in films such as Blade Runner, E.T. and Silent Running say something significant about the way we consider ourselves in relation to the other, then you are going to love this. And like all good films of this ilk you are left with plenty to chew over once the credits roll, with the filmmaker leaving it clear that there is far more left unknown than known in this world of ours." | Mark - Programmer

The Mirrored Message

The Mirrored Message documents two scientists as they prototype a new device that transfers data between wireless computer networks and living plants. Observing their work from within a sealed electronics facility near Stockholm, we follow procedural steps in the device’s programming and fabrication. From the artificial air of a controlled lab, we move to a coastal forest near the Baltic Sea, where the transmitter is installed for testing. As the humans slowly fade from the scene, a living specimen comes online, finally addressable by a local network. 

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