|
Climate ControlSarah Lasley
A metafictional comedy about the intersection of the climate crisis and generative AI. A director making a documentary about the perils of fossil fuel extraction is consistently subverted by an AI agent that wants to tell a generic love story.
|
The film has a DIY ethos to it, as you made it collaboratively with your students and used deliberately low fi computer animations to create the visuals. Could you tell us about the process of making this film in collaboration with your students?
Yea, the concept for this film grew out of conversations I was having with students in my Social Change Filmmaking class around climate anxiety and feelings of overwhelm and exhaustion when thinking of the scale of environmental crises. Through these classroom conversations, I realized a stark difference in my elder millennial approach to climate justice (information-spewing, spiraling doom) and the response of my Gen Z students, who are more willing to put their bodies on the line for what they believe in. This was in late 2022 and simultaneously, the wide-scale release of ChatGPT 3.5 had just landed, bringing with it the threat of displacing us all. Little info was available about the carbon footprint of generative AI at the time, but students were incensed by the idea that human creativity could be replicated by a machine.
Yea, the concept for this film grew out of conversations I was having with students in my Social Change Filmmaking class around climate anxiety and feelings of overwhelm and exhaustion when thinking of the scale of environmental crises. Through these classroom conversations, I realized a stark difference in my elder millennial approach to climate justice (information-spewing, spiraling doom) and the response of my Gen Z students, who are more willing to put their bodies on the line for what they believe in. This was in late 2022 and simultaneously, the wide-scale release of ChatGPT 3.5 had just landed, bringing with it the threat of displacing us all. Little info was available about the carbon footprint of generative AI at the time, but students were incensed by the idea that human creativity could be replicated by a machine.
|
I’ve long collaborated with my students in the classroom. Modeling a power-with, not power-over, approach to film production is embedded in my curriculum. Each semester, we have multiple in-class group shoots where the whole class shoots together with me, so I knew what this group of students was capable of as collaborators. In summer 2023, I was awarded an Artist in Residence through Darmstädter Sezession in Germany with the intention of making a film about Lützerath, a hamlet that was occupied for 3 years by youth activists protesting its destruction for the expansion of the nearby Garzweiler coal mine. This got me thinking about how extraction relates to generative AI. Tech industries extract our data, yes, but they also extract our attention away from important, human issues. Not to mention how the AI industry feeds into our current energy crisis by relying on extractivist industries to power their data centers. I asked the class if they’d like to make a film about AI and extractivism, and they were all on board. The project was made outside of any class, so it wasn’t graded and no one was required to participate. I raised the funds to pay them all professional wages on the project and was even able to travel three of the students with me to Germany to shoot at Lützerath, which by the time we arrived had been fully leveled by RWE energy company.
Lastly, because you mentioned the low-fi approach to the film’s aesthetic, I love using a hand-made aesthetic to talk about techno-festishism. I think the promise of technology is so fragile, so easy to puncture with a well-placed fart joke. Many of my students use humor to process their existential doom, so that approach to storytelling came easily to this group. They were comfortable improvising and riffing on the script, and there are a few easter eggs in the film that the students suggested - mostly Christmas-themed. |
The film also has a sharp wit to it that manages not to detract from the message of the film and the story of the activists in Lützerath, how did you work to strike the balance between the humour of the hijacking AI agent and the topic of climate crisis and activism?
Life lately feels like oscillating between tears, laughter, and frustration– many times all at once, scrambled in the middle. I wanted the edit to reflect this and feel a bit clunky in places, to feel kinda wrong.
Life lately feels like oscillating between tears, laughter, and frustration– many times all at once, scrambled in the middle. I wanted the edit to reflect this and feel a bit clunky in places, to feel kinda wrong.
|
I think for me the film is about the power of images to persuade you to feel and believe in something, and how the image can also fail to convince. The documentary tropes at the beginning of the film are somewhat effective, but when it starts to get a bit too doom and gloom, the film moves into the AI world… it gets distracted. My character in the film constantly tries to pull attention back to the serious issues. There are places in the middle of the film, when we cut to the interview of an actual Youth Green Party activist, where you might start to feel something powerful about the Lützerath story, but then ugh… the AI interrupts again. That yo yo effect feels like the current media cycle we’re stuck in, where distraction is a major tactic to deflect. By the time the film lands in a fully simulated 3D environment and everyone’s singing karaoke, we swing to the archival footage, where we see the real people who were fighting the fight in Lützerath, putting their bodies in the way of these massive excavators and police force.
|
Throughout the film the 4th wall is continuously broken adding to the absurdism of the film, it turns the film into a meta-narrative about the art of film making itself. Can you tell us a bit about what led you to using absurdism in your work?
My work has always broken the 4th wall in some way. I mean in many ways, it’s just my sense of humor. I love camp and acknowledging the embarrassment of performing for the camera– it’s so innately self-conscious. I’m also interested in how quickly the illusion of filmmaking can be ruptured. I used to think this way about the idealized concept of “wilderness”. What’s the smallest human intervention that ruins the illusion of “wilderness”? A gum wrapper, a footprint in the mud, a plane flying overhead? I like to think about the fragility of the images and illusions we buy into. Technology is so ridiculous and so fetishistic at the same time. I think the promise of technology to save us is absurd, so form follows content there.
My work has always broken the 4th wall in some way. I mean in many ways, it’s just my sense of humor. I love camp and acknowledging the embarrassment of performing for the camera– it’s so innately self-conscious. I’m also interested in how quickly the illusion of filmmaking can be ruptured. I used to think this way about the idealized concept of “wilderness”. What’s the smallest human intervention that ruins the illusion of “wilderness”? A gum wrapper, a footprint in the mud, a plane flying overhead? I like to think about the fragility of the images and illusions we buy into. Technology is so ridiculous and so fetishistic at the same time. I think the promise of technology to save us is absurd, so form follows content there.
|
The film’s main focus is on the youth activism that tried to save the German village of Lützerath from being demolished to make way for mining operations. Do you feel their activism is emblematic of global movements against climate catastrophe?
I think there is something emblematic in their activism. It was part of their goal of remaining in Lützerath long after it was evacuated. The activists knew they were going to lose the big war. They knew they would eventually be run out by force, but they wanted to hold out for as long as they could to inspire others to fight back. The floods of activists to Lützerath on Day X were there to re-invigorate the effort and make a push for visibility– to show numbers, to show their commitment to the cause. That’s why Greta Thunberg was willing to get arrested at Lützerath. She’s the emblematic face of youth activism and knows that her presence would bring widespread attention. That was what inspired me most about this story, there’s a kind of David and Goliath motif if you compare the tiny protestors to the massive bucketwheel excavators that sit inside a massive hole in the Earth at a mine run by one of the largest global energy corporations. Scale was important in telling the story, and seeing the flood of young people at the end of the film, followed by behind the scenes footage of my students making the film, was meant to add this deeply human finale to a film that murked in the digital mess throughout. |
I really enjoyed the “low fi” computer graphics used in the film instead of generative AI, they serve as a reminder that we don’t need AI to create things. What are your thoughts on the increasing encouragement and encroachment of AI in the creative sectors?
I have many thoughts on this topic, and I talk regularly about it with my classes, colleagues, friends, and anyone who will listen. AI is being forced upon us, especially in my fields of academia and the creative arts. We’re constantly forced to pay attention to it and respond to it, while most of us would rather focus our energy on a multitude of other things. I don’t have a devout anti-AI stance, because I’ve seen these waves of hysteria following the introduction of new technologies over my lifetime. But I’ve also seen how those technologies are misused, cause real harm, and are often unregulated in the name of capitalism. Many of the issues I encounter with my students, and their potential to learn and grow as humans, artists, and thinkers, are directly at odds with AI and exacerbated by its promise of “ease”. I constantly encourage a slower, more informed approach to technology. Ultimately AI is a tool that will change the way we work and be creative, but the fact that it’s tied up in capitalism means the values it’s built upon don’t align with my own.
In response to these overlapping concerns, my students and I made www.promptresponsibly.com, a website dedicated to AI through a sustainability lens that serves as an impact campaign for the film. It gives info on the carbon footprint of generative AI, key pitfalls and challenges, and ideas and tools for how to shrink your digital footprint and use technology more ethically. I think it’s important we, and particularly my students, learn AI literacy and workflows, but I caution the mental and emotional effects of relying too heavily on this or any technology to make your art for you. It’s easy to “compute” and difficult to mine and trust your own instincts. That’s where I try to linger and murk.
I have many thoughts on this topic, and I talk regularly about it with my classes, colleagues, friends, and anyone who will listen. AI is being forced upon us, especially in my fields of academia and the creative arts. We’re constantly forced to pay attention to it and respond to it, while most of us would rather focus our energy on a multitude of other things. I don’t have a devout anti-AI stance, because I’ve seen these waves of hysteria following the introduction of new technologies over my lifetime. But I’ve also seen how those technologies are misused, cause real harm, and are often unregulated in the name of capitalism. Many of the issues I encounter with my students, and their potential to learn and grow as humans, artists, and thinkers, are directly at odds with AI and exacerbated by its promise of “ease”. I constantly encourage a slower, more informed approach to technology. Ultimately AI is a tool that will change the way we work and be creative, but the fact that it’s tied up in capitalism means the values it’s built upon don’t align with my own.
In response to these overlapping concerns, my students and I made www.promptresponsibly.com, a website dedicated to AI through a sustainability lens that serves as an impact campaign for the film. It gives info on the carbon footprint of generative AI, key pitfalls and challenges, and ideas and tools for how to shrink your digital footprint and use technology more ethically. I think it’s important we, and particularly my students, learn AI literacy and workflows, but I caution the mental and emotional effects of relying too heavily on this or any technology to make your art for you. It’s easy to “compute” and difficult to mine and trust your own instincts. That’s where I try to linger and murk.
|
Sarah Lasley is an award-winning filmmaker from Louisville, Kentucky living and working in Eureka, California. Her no-budget films critique our current socio-political moment with absurdist humor. She has screened internationally at festivals, museums, and galleries, such as Slamdance, Ann Arbor, Cairo Video Festival, 25 FPS Film Festival, Les Instants Video, Katonah Museum of Art, and the Wrong Bienniale. She holds an MFA from Yale School of Art and a BFA from University of Louisville and was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2004.
|
|
