Research insights

Interdisciplinary collaboration emerges from the Leviathan project as a film-making methodology rich in potential. By drawing scientists, anthropologists, philosophers, lawyers, activists, futurists, trauma specialists et al into the project I have been able to go beyond the limits of both my own knowledge and my artistic practice. At all stages of the project, conversations with experts beyond my field have introduced fresh ideas and inspired new directions. Collaboration has laid the basis for developing the direction and narrative of each episode. Encounters, for example, with marine scientists Madeleine van Oppen and Louise Firth (see Project Narrative) led directly to a new phase of the project. Both were engaged in future-casting research – looking 100 years ahead – and my discussions with them inspired Leviathan Legacy, the VR elements of the project. 

Insights derived from such conversations are fundamental to my modus operandi, informing every aspect of the creative process. For example, a heated debate among marine scientists about massification fed directly into Leviathan Legacy Part I. Will sea creatures grow in response to climate changes, or shrink? Might ever-larger lionfish (a venomous marine fish native to the Indo-Pacific) or jellyfish one day be on the ascendant? By 2020, scientists and fishermen were noting record-size lionfish (49cm) off the US coast. Two years earlier, in making Leviathan, VR had enabled us to tap into that debate, with an imagined hybrid creature based on scientific speculation. The creature also draws on science fiction. And arguably it is this mix of real science and science-fiction “realities” that sets my research apart.

A 2018 Amsterdam symposium at which Martin Ziegler, a paleoclimatologist at University of Utrecht, spoke on what might happen to Europe if the ice caps melt, is another example of the integral part real-world scientific thinking plays in the development of my film-making. Ziegler’s maps showed Denmark and the Netherlands submerged under a continuous stretch of water between the Baltic and Kent. The upshot is The Terrarium, the second part of Leviathan Legacy, co-commissioned by Folkestone Triennial and Tallinn’s Kai Art Center, to be premiered at the covid-19-delayed Kent festival in November 2021. 

Episode 6, which addresses key issues in the Middle East through alternate voices of African refugees, exemplifies my use of collaborative research as a methodology. In highlighting connections between climate change, migration and mental health, the episode was largely informed by human rights activists and lawyers, who shared their knowledge of trauma, based on their dealings with African refugees and those affected by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The delicate and complex theme of the episode involved working with people of Ethiopian and Eritrean heritage, weaving newly gleaned information into the script (and getting it translated into Eritrean) until two days before shooting. 

A collaborative effort, however, requires management. Knowing when to abdicate authorship and when to step in and retake it was vital to the success of the venture. This was particularly true of the Leviathan public programme, where, for example, my collaborators in Seoul and Munich embraced the project as their own, arranging conferences, producing literature and publicity material, while others were less experienced and needed guidance and support from my studio.

Editing as the key to coherence

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. Building on my earlier film work, I achieved a viscerally active form of editing – almost in advance of language – which enabled me to succinctly combine complex ideas and give them emotional force. In Episode 3, for example, shots of people consuming seafood combine with gross imagery of overfishing and (with a nod to Pier Paolo Pasolini) scenes of sexual excess. The fragmented, episodic serial format has proved an excellent vehicle through which to glimpse future psychological and environmental fragmentation as normal life erodes in the age of climate change. My efforts to retune the serial format as a kind of temporal form connecting cosmological time and geological time with a vision of a near-ish future, I hope, set the work apart.