Mother
Arkah

A Filmic Allegory on the Rise and Fall of Ideologies

‘Mother Arkah’ is an animated short film exploring a speculative climate-apocalypse scenario and the hypothesis of the posthumanist ideology ‘Bio-Technoism’.
The project investigates concepts on prohibiting the ‘religion of growth’, future power structures shaped within the ‘Posthuman Convergence’, AI-driven symbiogenetic evolution and autopoietic architectures. The film serves as an allegory on mechanisms behind political belief systems, while posing questions about how deep the ‘urge for innovation’ is rooted within us humans and therefore how much humanness our planet can take.

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Abstract

‘Mother Arkah’ is an animated short film, exploring a speculative post- climate-apocalypse situation and the posthumanist political system of ‘Bio-Technoism’. Utilizing fiction and entertainment, the project investigates concepts and ideas on prohibited innovation for the benefit of ecological balance, future power structures shaped by technology and ideology, the Posthuman Convergence, living architectures and the digital sublime, AI-driven symbiogenetic evolution and the entanglement of nature itself – opening up questions about how deep the urge for innovation is rooted within humanness and therefore how much humanness our planet can take. On a meta level the film serves as an allegory on the rise and fall of ideologies throughout human history, using personifications to explore the various underlying aspects and mechanisms.

Summary: The film tells a story set far in the future. To save life on earth after the environmental collapse, a secret research program creates giant living biotopes, a so-called ‘megastructure’, to preserve life until planet earth is habitable again. The only long-term threat is humanity’s urge for innovation, which inevitably leads to ecological catastrophes and mass extinctions. Therefore, this urge needs to be suppressed through ideology, which is maintained by worshipping a symbiogenetic consciousness and an ideology of ‘pure existing’.

‘Mother Arkah’ can be seen as a film taking on characteristics of a theatre production, staging and communicating this speculative scenario through four personas and various virtual set designs. A nonlinear approach to storytelling discloses philosophical questions surrounding the conflation of technology and biology, while simultaneously exploring mechanisms behind political belief systems.

Keywords: Posthuman Convergence; Criminalization of Growth and Innovation; Ideology and Mass Manipulation; Cultism; Symbiogenesis; Architectural Utopias

Hypothesis
A Posthumanist Form of Governance

The basis of this diploma project is the formulation of a hypothesis around a posthumanist political system, called ‘Bio-Technoism’. Looking back at the development of political regimes, several major shifts can be described. Therefore this hypothesis starts with a compact excursion on state authority, beginning with the era of world religions, a point in history where authority is coming from god and religions, executed and justified by the church or other self-proclaimed ‘representatives of god on earth’. Those power structures shifted during the rise of humanism and the new era of science. Authority was now worldly. Triggered by the industrial revolution, which brought fast and radical changes in society, new unprecedented political concepts and state-size experiments emerged during the 20th century. Often a small group of people enforced their ideologies. With the ‘End of History’, as described by Francis Fukuyama in 1992, western liberal democracy was now seen as the final form of human government. Just recently, triggered by the massive societal changes brought about by the digital revolution, another shift of power is occurring: authority from data – or ‘Dataism’, as described by the historian and philosopher Yuval Harari. He claims that human emotions, the drive behind humanism, are nothing but algorithms and can therefore be controlled, manipulated and programmed. This posthumanist political scheme is resulting in the postfactual age, the era of big data and human enhancement. In the near future another revolution will take place: the fusion of biotechnology and information technology. Again, this development will bring unprecedented changes to society and therefore nourish new forms of governance. Triggered by this unpredictable biotechnological revolution, what novel form of governance could emerge in the future? Could the next logical form of authority be a combination of big data, AI and organic components? An authority coming from ‘enhanced nature’? This train of thought forms the basis for the speculations, fictions and critical artistic reflections within the project ‘Mother Arkah’, where a cybernetic organism – a symbiogenesis of artificial intelligence and biological life forms – is the indisputable authority. Within this hypothetical political concept of ‘Bio-Technoism’, the governing system would not only manage human-related affairs, it would also manage and maintain whole ecosystems. The maxim would not be economic growth, but rather a posthumanist approach of long-term ecological equilibrium and welfare for all living beings.




Research Question

The thoughts stated in the hypothesis about ‘Bio-Technoism’ lead to the artistic research question posed within the project ‘Mother Arkah’: How might a future society and environment, situated under the political framework of ‘Bio-Technoism’, emerge, be maintained and potentially descend?

Film Stills