Solstice-5: Forgotten Archives
Visual effects artist and director Paul Chadeisson having introduced Solstice-5 in a stunning film which has amassed almost five million views since it was released just over a year ago, he has returned to that distant world in a second short, uninhabited but home to vast wealth in the form of oil and minerals sought by two rival conglomerates, the Continental Alliance and the Coalition, who exploit the planet without regard to consequence.
Presented as “the last remnants of the once-secret archives,” Solstice-5: Forgotten Archives is a newly released continuation from the first short film which takes the future history forward through the years 2137 to 2140, quietly sidestepping the intimation that the planet may once have been home to an apparently intelligent species but not superceding the suggestion, rather focusing on another part of the unfolding narrative.
The implication being that the competing industrial superpowers prefer that an unconfirmed hypothesis which might impact the perception of their operations should not be discussed in a public forum, perhaps that information is being suppressed, redacted from view, and undeniably in the eyes of those who have pressed forward with the extraction of the resources there are more immediate concerns.
Once again a visual spectacle of colossal machinery floating above barren landscapes, drills and harvesters and refineries and their support vehicles, the sheer scale of the objects dwarfing the scant operating crew, their rusting hulls speak of the age and disregard in which the operation is held, the end result to the shareholders all that is valued, Solstice-5: Forgotten Archives taking the awe and tragedy of Koyaanisqatsi and transporting it to a world alien but not so different to our own.
Silent sentinels floating above the surface, the sands and oil-stained oceans, the ravaged rocks and mountains cleaved with surgical precision to expose the strata in a process called “automated long-range landscape levelling”, they are not guardians of the world so much as hawks waiting to swoop on their prey far below, helpless and defenceless; given autonomy, who holds responsibility for the machines, who is answerable for their actions?
The repeating pattern of the diggers and affront which mocks the very nature it consumes, the ungoverned self-replication a cancer unleashed on the world “unrestrained by moral imperatives,” ignoring the failures which are overall regarded as negligible but on any real level catastrophic, the next stage is nuclear fracking to access deeper resources, a flashpoint in the networked machines which operate without oversight, an entire ecosystem and any history it hid and any possibility it might have harboured destroyed in moments, the Forgotten Archives hidden for good reason.
Solstice-5: Forgotten Archives is currently available on YouTube
