Project framework: context, research questions, summary of research insights

Leviathan is an ambitious multi-year, multimedia project that looks at the fault lines between human and marine ecology, climate and species. As much open-source resource as artist’s project, the work is continually informed by an ever-growing number of researchers, including marine biologists, oceanographers, political scientists, architects, neurologists and trauma specialists to create a series of 10 films (started in 2017), a virtual-reality trilogy, paintings and sculptures that imagine various speculative futures. When the project is exhibited, researchers are invited to present their work to new audiences as part of a dynamic public programme. 

The 10-part film series (of which six have been completed and screened) envisages a future eerily like our present, where inhabitants are the survivors of a cataclysmic solar event. Each film episode is written from the point of view of a different individual, providing insight into their particular trauma and character traits and giving each episode its own personality, visual language and rhythm. 

The larger narrative follows a migratory journey across Europe, Asia, North Africa and beyond, encountering a series of idiosyncratic communities along the way. Taking a global and collective approach, Leviathan looks at what is increasingly not only a humanitarian crisis, but a wider systemic crisis within our biosphere. As the protagonists’ journeys progress and increasingly intertwine with others’ throughout the film, we see a shift from fragmentation to resilience in their methods for surviving, amid competing visions for how the future might be shaped.

Context

Referencing the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes in its title, the Leviathan project is situated within multimedia and cross-disciplinary collaborative art practices addressing urgent sociopolitical issues, such as climate change and migration. Leviathan sits alongside environmental art and speculative futures initiatives, for example: TBA21-Academy, a contemporary art organisation focusing on the ocean through the lens of art with a view to inspiring action; Studio Olafur Eliasson; e-flux’s Supercommunity text-generating intervention at the 56th Venice Biennale; or the Serpentine Gallery’s long-term General Ecology project, researching “more-than-humanism, climate justice and environmental balance”. In terms of addressing trauma, it can be bracketed with work by Kader Attia. 

A complex set of personal and intellectual circumstances gave rise to the project. Having successfully made the feature film Piercing Brightness (2013), I realised I had no interest in pursuing a career as a conventional film-maker: what interested me was the structures of representation. On the level of ideas, I was absorbed by the concept of democracy and by environmental issues, specifically the oceans, but sought a way to combine the two studies. I also felt a need to reach out beyond the artworld, without diluting the focus or aesthetic standards of my work. 

Leviathan arose from a realisation that my interest in oceans and democracy could be brought together around the question of human survival and the future of our planet. At the same time, the project became an investigation of film form: Leviathan Cycle draws on the history of the serial format, at once referencing Charles Dickens, political pamphlets and contemporary consumption of film (the Netflix phenomenon). The serial format enabled me to explore diverse bodies of knowledge and tell a story in a sequence of episodes. 

Each episode, meanwhile, would comprise many fragments knitted together by a distinctive form of editing. Leviathan combines shot footage, archive material and nature documentary, edited so as to make visceral narrative connections between different formats and points of view. The world of tomorrow is described and narrated by various survivors; as the viewpoint shifts from the human to the non-human at regular intervals we understand this world as one where we – the humans – are no longer at the centre. Rather than remaining in the background, the conversations with scientists, and other collaborators who inspired the work, are integrated into Leviathan’s dynamic public programme and archived on the project’s openaccess online platform.

Key questions

1 In what ways might Leviathan develop interdisciplinary collaboration as an artistic methodology? 

2 How might a contemporary art project bridge the divide between the arts and sciences and use interdisciplinary dialogue as the basis for developing characters and narrative structure? 

3 How might the serial format be used to convey the psychological and environmental fragmentation of life in the age of climate change?

Summary of research insights

Interdisciplinary collaboration emerges from the project as a film-making methodology with rich potential. At all stages, conversations with experts – marine scientists, in particular – have inspired fresh ideas. Collaboration has laid the basis for developing the direction and narrative of each episode. The technical possibilities of VR offer creative scope, but also a way to mix real science with science-fiction “realities” in distinctive ways. Combining shot footage, archive material and nature documentary, Leviathan achieves coherence through a style of editing that makes visceral narrative connections between different formats and points of view. In formal terms, the fragmented, episodic serial format is a thoroughly appropriate vehicle for conveying the psychological and environmental fragmentation to come in the age of climate change.