Featured Forest Tales: A Larval Cinema - The Smoldering Forest View Digital Media

Workshop Presentation
Anuj Vaidya  

Forest Tales: A Larval Cinema is a speculative, femi-queer, eco-cinema project which swims in the gene pool of the South Asian Sitayana epic tradition. Sita, the female protagonist of the epic, emerges as shape-shifter and shaman in this restorying, to tell the tale of forests and fires - both real and virtual. Originally imagined as a film, this project intended to use human-powered (bicycles, wheelchairs, etc) solutions for the production of the moving image. However, since the most environmentally-friendly film is one that never gets made, the project now exists as a performance of the cinematic, allowing me to focus on the eco-logics (Ivakhiv) of the hydrocarbon imagination (Bozak) embedded in our image-making technologies and practices. A speculative cinema project at the edge of the sixth extinction, Forest Tales not only metamorphoses narrative but form itself. As a larval cinema, it proposes that we not only radically reimagine the stories we tell about our pasts/presents/futures, but also remediate the image-making technologies that we use to narrate, circulate, and consume them. In this motion-picture workshop, audience members become-sprocket and move still images in sequence, while I perform the soundtrack live. Participants are then blindfolded and led through a visualization of a scene from the imagined cinema, in effect co-creating the film through their imagination. Changing the form of the moving image apparatus transforms our social relations: if we had used a projector, we would all be facing the screen; instead now we are in a circle, facing each other.