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EDWARD GWYN JONES

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Geostorm, 2020





Two channel video, dur.00:16:28

Featured in Stillpoint Magazine’s Issue FLIGHT accompanied by Following the Bread Crumbs, an essay on the dissolution of truth and on the political manifestation of Fight or Flight, by Dr Steven Setterberg.
 
Geostorm looks at the seismograph beneath the movie studio, presenting a microcosm of a brain repeatedly incised by catastrophes happening outside of its local perception. Music here functions as an affective glue, continuously unsettling and seducing the viewer.


In Geostorm, California is a metaphor. It is a failed neoliberal utopia perpetually providing accelerant to its own destruction. Hollywood, through the production of cultural normalization, imagines in abstract its own demise, as the land it sits upon bubbles with heat.

Geostorm looks at the seismograph beneath the movie studio. It explores how our psychological, physical, and digital distance from catastrophic events stratifies and compartmentalizes actively pressing realities. It does so through the internal language of California, taking the media and language of consumption and dissemination, mostly viral video and products of the California culture industry, as its form.

Geostorm critiques a desensitizing and distancing media environment whilst simultaneously attempting to reckon with our complicity as viewers and consumers in this construction. Music functions here as seductive affective glue, a rhythmical sphygmomanometer. This tension operates as a core method of Geostorm which continuously unsettles and seduces the viewer, a microcosm of a brain repeatedly incised by catastrophes happening outside of its physical perception.

At points, amongst the sometimes challenging footage,
Geostorm turns on its screensaver, Jupiter. A spatial and temporal break, a gassy giant of endless storms and toxic atmosphere. An idea far enough away to be imagined, but close enough to see the endless rumble of its great red spot.

Geostorm is concerned with perceptual notions of flight, the distance and abstraction of land viewed from above, with the omnipresence of a camera racing towards a planet. If flight condenses time and geography then Geostorm precipitates instant global arrival through the screen and via networks, an instantaneous flight.

-Acompanying text, Stillpoint Magazine