Towards a New Science Fiction

In 2018, I was getting off BART in San Francisco, wearing a 3M Professional Multi-Purpose Respirator, waiting to be picked up in a semi-autonomous self-driving Tesla, about to participate in Autopiloto, a 24 hour, mobile radio project by Radioee, about critical responses to all things automated. I was invited to discuss my work researching crude oil and mysticism in the mid 1800s. Breathing heavily through my filtered mask, I stood at the Glen Park Bart stop waiting to be picked up by the self-driving vehicle transmitting moving electromagnetic radio waves, watching troves of passengers exit the station wearing respirators and dust masks to escape the toxic atmosphere created by the dense smoke of numerous California wildfires, it occurred to me we earth-dwellers must collectively update our post-apocalyptic narratives. They have arrived (again, for many). They are no longer fiction.

I tried to write this before. About 2 years ago, while I was in the throes of watching every episode of Star Trek, in order. Eventually I did it; more than 700 50 minute episodes. It took me about 1.5 years, which averages to more than an episode a day. I finished on a flight from Kampala, Uganda to San Diego, CA, after spending nearly a year living in Ghana, Ethiopia, and Uganda. On my way to Tamale, in northern Ghana—starting with the flight there—where I lived for some time, I read Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti novella series, Nigerian sci-fi, feminist sci-fi. It was by no means my first step into Afrofuturism or speculative feminism and the many strains of SF (string figures, speculative fabulations, scientific facts), as Donna Haraway calls them. Octavia Butler has transformed my sense of what literature, story-telling, and world-making can be. Similarly, I’ve been a fan of the mysterious Detroit techno group, Drexciya, for a long time. In the late 80s and early 90s, the cult producers began the mythology that Drexciya is a lost Atlantis civilization deep under the ocean consisting of pregnant slaves who were thrown overboard during the middle passage. All their music advanced this narrative. Before them, in the 1970s, Laaraji, who is a proponent of radical laughter, advanced an ambient, meditative cosmic philosophy. Of course, Sun Ra, too, and his Arkestra, were sent to earth to communicate the cosmic vibrations of sound.

It is through the Sun Ra compound that one of my favorite quotes comes into existence: “communities that have agency are capable of forming their own philosophical structures,” attributed to British saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings. A wonderful notion indeed and, I think, the important launch pad for why speculative fiction is so important. Samuel “Chip” Delaney is an early progener of queer black science fiction, someone who certainly mobilized new philosophical concepts. I’m particularly fond of his work Nova because we all—earth beings—are sun worshipers after all. I feel this way in part because it links me to my bi-racial Mexican heritage and the ancestry of that lineage. The Aztec were very much children of the sun.

I’ve spent some time reading Latin American origin stories, the Mayan Popul Vuh, for instance. Specifically to see how it, in comparison to other origin texts like the Bible and the Koran, reference crude oil. In these early texts, different conceptualizations of the black corpse of the sun—as Reza Negarestani describes oil in his foundational speculative theory text, Cyclonopedia—provide different genealogies to the substance that the modern world is shaped with in nearly every aspect of life.

But, claiming origin stories as speculative fiction is not without stakes. On the one hand, I think it is a constructive move to bring these texts into literature and away from the risks of zealous creationism. On the other hand, to indoctrinate texts like the Popul Vuh into a western literary discourse is not an emancipatory practice of self-determination—communities with agency are capable of forming their own philosophical structures. Indeed, more and more western scholars are looking critically at the theology of enlightenment. In the Facing Gaia lectures, famed sociologist Bruno Latour asks, “What does it mean for people to measure, to represent, and compose the shape of the earth to which they are bound?” He continues in categorical terms:  

Earth: understood as a historical conception or geohistorical adventure. Gaia: from James Lovelock, the most secular historical figure science has studied, not unified but composed—not nature… a political theology of nature. Nature-known, by the sciences… in epistemological mode nature defined by full attributes of exteriority, unity, inanimate agency, and undisputability…

Others too have begun to view the rationalist science of enlightenment as a theological output. In The Birth of Energy, Cara New Daggett looks at the history of the science of energy as naturecultural, the inseparable entanglement of nature and culture.

This is not particularly new. Many artists, writers, and critical theorists have challenged the anthropocentrism of Western conceptualizations of the cosmos. I am particularly interested in Karen Barad’s critique of what they call the metaphysics of individualism which challenges the conception of representationalism, in favor of practices, doings, becomings, and performativity. In this view, there are no essential characteristics of any “thing”, but rather things become with/through matter’s ongoing differentiation of the world, where matter is always already intra-actively co-constituted by material-discursive conditions. Barad calls this agential realism. There is density to this idea, that I will willfully sidestep for the purposes of this writing, but it is a start, I think, to allow for the proposal of many worlds, which numerous anthropologists (Marisol de La Cedena, Mario Blser, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, etc.) have argued for, to coexist simultaneously. These are worlds in which Isabel Stengers’ conception of cosmopolitics as a matter of concern can prosper: “gathering together for interests in common which are not the same interests.”

Really, though, I want to focus not on the theorists making these arguments, but the work that new speculative storytelling can do. Metaphors do not rule our world per se, but many people, from Friedrich Nietzsche to George Lakoff have warned against the risk of relying on language too much to shape worlds. Before I get away from theorists though, I’ll let Haraway’s thoughts overemphasize the point, because she does it so damn well:

Even rendered in an American English-language text like this one, Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa, Medusa, Spider Woman, and all their kin are some of the many thousand names proper to a vein of SF that Lovecraft could not have imagined or embraced—namely, the webs of speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, and scientific fact. It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems (Haraway, 2016, 101).

So, how is contemporary science fiction doing? What figures is it figuring? Visually, in the current so-called golden age of television, there ought to be a surplus of conceptually rich sci-fi, magical realism, indigenous futurism, and other worlding narratives. There are some, see Skawennati and the aforementioned Okorafur. But far more frequent are the utterly banal (at best) and downright problematic (at worst) rehashing of the current techno-capitalist values. Most current sci-fi does not even represent the best version of the nonetheless still ossified faith that technology alone will “save” humanity: left accelerationism. Instead, series after series reproduces the most boring tropes of a new technological arms race, surveillance capitalism, and what Jenny Odell calls the attention economy. Robot camera choreography does not matter if it is not contributing to the conceptual realization of the work. Technological improvements in CGI, camera speed, rigs, etc. can be noteworthy accomplishments, but they do not, on their own, constitute meaningful developments of anything specifically, or help mobilize new conditions for thinking.

Good sci-fi, which I think is more often found in speculative fiction, creates alternative worlds in which new concepts or relations can be explored seriously. It does not graft the benign values of the present into future conditions. Good SF reminds us that communities that have agency are capable of forming their own philosophical structures and provides frameworks for conceptualizing those concepts. The worlds we live with/in now, in the present, are also conditions of standardization, governed by the philosophical concepts of the enlightenment: individualism, anthropocentrism, extractive capitalism. The list is not finite. Nor is the potential otherwise, precisely the reward of SF.

Amidst the contemporary moment, which, dare I say, was prophesized by Octavia Butler in her Parable Series to a frightening degree of accuracy, in which fragmentation, alienation, ignorance, extremism, and environmental catastrophe are enveloping all that there is, we earth beings need better storytellers. Not the Cli-Fi genre, which commodifies disaster capitalism. We don’t need stories for the future, we need stories for the present. Stories that provide new frameworks for how to create new concepts. Stories that update the idea of apocalypse to the slow death of ecosystems, identities, and the ongoing destruction of many different worlds: island dwellers, indigenous populations, species-beings, glacial ice, salmon, and more. These worlds already experience the apocalypse that we moderns—as Latour would say—are just catching up to. We need stories that challenge concepts of “we” and “us” and “I” in meaningful ways and practical responses to the spacetime disciplining that has colonized life.

Thinking about Media Art in Northern Ghana

This was originally written in 2019 while I was living in Tamale, an industrializing city in the northern region of Ghana.           

When I walk by used electronic repair shops, I usually stop and talk to the dudes working outside. They work under an aluminum roof, taking apart old fax machines, blenders, printers, and other dusty equipment. “Do you know any people who take this equipment apart and make art with it?” I ask. Similarly, I stop and talk to the older men who run the music shops all over town. Most of the shops have names like Ottis Music or Relax Music, and sometimes phrases that don’t carry grammatical significance. Ghana was a British Colony, so it is an English speaking silo in the otherwise Francophone West Africa. Ghana is also a Christian country as a result, and by some global indexes, it is the most religious country in the world. That said, northern Ghana—specifically Tamale (pronounced Tom-uh-lay), where I currently live, the fastest growing city in West Africa—is heavily Muslim, and most people speak the local dialect Dagbani more frequently than English. There are other languages spoken too, such as Ashante Twi, one of the most common dialects in Ghana.

So, there are other reasons—besides the fact that most music shops carry more electric fans and motors than music—which make for a rich, material-semiotic experience at these places of business. The electronic repair folks don’t understand the idea of making art from electronics, and there is one person in town that makes sculptures from metal who is often suggested in response to my question. These shops are curious places to spend time. Building materials and infrastructure are of a different grade in this part of the world and normalizing a baseline for what constitutes “good” and “bad,” “safe” or “dangerous,” “clean” or “dirty” space is a complicated task that requires time and openness. To be clear, Tamale is a very “safe place,” in the way that westerners tend to discuss safety in the Global South. The most dangerous thing by far in Tamale is the motorbike traffic–and it is very dangerous. Dust is everywhere; Tamale is a distant gateway to the Sahel, a desert transition region that encompasses the surrounding Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger  and other West and East African countries. There is always dust in this 100 degree sub-desert ecoclimactic zone. But, it is January, which means it is harmattan season in Ghana. The time of year of dry heat, cool 90 degree nights, and visibility-impairing ambient dust storms. So, the aluminum covered, outdoor electronic workstations and music shops are generally slicked with a powdery, burnt-orange and bronze colored sand.

I bought a tape player during one of my first days in town. There is quite a selection of old, unopened, cassette tapes. They are mostly highlife and gospel music. Gospel, here, does not resemble the genre one might associate it with in the United States, though it is very much music of Christian worship. Hiplife is Ghanaian hip hop and a strong tradition of it began to grow in the 90s. In many of these shops, there is old and dusty stereo equipment that is most certainly for sale but might not work and has probably not been moved since some of the tapes were produced. I find these places to be quite peaceful and enjoyable spots to chat and learn. They are quite gendered, though. There are some very charming social habits in Ghana that challenge gender normativity in the U.S., nonetheless, Tamale is a very gender-stratified place. That said, I want to say on the on set that Bay Area concepts of critical race theory, decolonial discourse, and intersectionality cannot be arbitrarily grafted onto Tamale, or Northern Ghana. Life here includes its own set of complex relationalities and agencies; local, tribal, regional, national, and international interdynamics; including my own presence; including representation and mediation. Of course it does.

I’m beginning to formulate a theory of media-information related to the materiality and history of shea butter, one of the only major global exports in Ghana, and a fundamental life practice of polyphonous forms. Everyone uses shea butter; it gets so hot people must moisturize their skin else it cracks, hardens, and drys. People put it on their feet, then put on socks before they go to sleep at night. But, shea is also an important part of the history of illumination: an earth media. Prior to industrialization, clay lamps burned shea oil for light. I had assumed paraffin wax was burned here until electrification, I was wrong.

The amount of goods—earth materials, plastics, textiles, or food—woman carry on their heads is astounding. And the streets are not for the faint of heart; motorbikes, three-wheeled yellow yellow taxis, and sometimes flatbed trucks frequently drive along the “pedestrian ways” against traffic; sidewalks are not a thing here. They honk at everyone, and they do not stop. Well balanced life-goods, atop the heads of women of all ages (and sometimes men) maneuver their way through the living maze that is Tamale city streets. This is to say, the pleasantness of the time I pass seeking out media-art practices in the various types of electric media stores in Tamale tend to be gender-enabled, or at least gender normalized. There is an interesting energy exchange that happens in public that defies this gender stratification: strangers helping each other stabilize large objects on their heads. Today, I saw a woman balance on her head—with the help of Amin, the man I was walking with—a stack of 3 empty crates measuring 3 feet wide and about 8 feet tall all together. Try to picture that. These exchanges happen based on whomever happens to be within spatial proximity.

There was a recent art exhibition in Tamale, titled “Northern Ghana Life,” curated by Nii Obodai, founder of Nuku Studio. The space was an old printing press, a long and narrow attractive building, in all its crumbling dustiness. It was a photo exhibition, part of Nuku Photo Festival occuring in Accra, Tamale, Wa and Kumasi and featuring eight Ghanaian photographers, including Nii’s work, two French photographers, and one U.S based photographer, each focusing on a different region of Northern Ghana. I was given a tour of the show after it had closed by one of the exhibition volunteers, a Maltese ex-pat married to a Ghanaian. She is a painter and says there is very little understanding of contemporary art in Tamale. She also tells me that there is, however, a modern art museum being built in Tamale, by a famous Ghanaian artist who is investing in modern art infrastructure for his hometown.

The idea of contemporary conceptual art does indeed seem secondary to just about everything else in Tamale. There is a Taxi driver who is the go-to for many foreigners living in Tamale, a large regal man named Dhubia, who drives a beaten up old car, but will take you pretty much anywhere. He recently drove me to a village an hour outside of Tamale and waited for me for hours while I was invited to observe a location shoot for a Tamale independent film studio, more on that soon. While driving the long burning road, Dhubia explained to me how much market vendors make a day and how much taxi drivers make a day. In short, market vendors make about 10 cedis ($2 U.S dollars) and taxi drivers can make up to 50 cedis ($10 bucks). Also, 80 percent of the country is illiterate. There are open sewers on the nicest of streets in Accra. Conceptual art, media art, I’m sorry to say are luxury topics. This coming from a person (me) who runs an art org and believes art practice is a necessary condition for the emancipation of equitable life and possibilities of existence in non-binary ways.

But, I have a different thought. I think it is a mistake to attribute significance to “modern art” as the preeminent example of contemporary art practice. What I mean is: life practices shape where certain domains of culture are performed. Complex conceptual thinking surrounding an art practice may not happen in northern Ghana in the social space that “moderns” may be accustomed to seeing it—namely, the gallery space, the museum, the cultural center, even the DIY, “Third Space,” or community collective, that the more radically-minded might prefer. Knowing whether or not “conceptual art” happens in Tamale may be limited by my ability to conceptualize a new space that might house it. For example, I was in Accra for new years eve. During the day, that city is a chaotic, vibrating oscillator of movement and sounds. I was excited to experience the streets of Oso, the district we were staying in, as the ball dropped. As it happens, the streets were quiet and abandoned at midnight. Ghana might be the most religious country in the world; for new years, everyone was in church. If I wanted a wild fun time, probably, I should have been there too. My point is that cultural happenings happen according to their own logic, and don’t give a damn about material-semiotic signifiers of the “outside.”

So, I keep talking to the electronic repair folks, music merchants, and also to the women who make and sell the abundant clay pottery. Gospel music is a pretty fun time here and maybe the nuanced media art practice is actually about shea butter. Pots are used here to store and cool water. The clay and shape of the pots cool the water inside, which in turn cool the surrounding ambient temperature: another amazing earth media. I’ve been using pots to propagate snake plant (sansevieria trifasciata), one of my favorite hardy indoor air-filtering plants. No one keeps indoor plants here. The concept of “indoors” doesn’t really exist—in the sense that there are available spaces entirely free from the harsh elements. Infrastructure is both a luxury and a natureculture phenomenon. But, the air quality is quite intense and not only because of harmattan. There is no infrastructure for trash. Most trash, including cans and plastic, is burned. The ground is an orchard of plastic bags. Trash also ends up in the open sewer drains, which coagulates in unpleasant ways. Snake plant grows outside here, and it is easy to use clippings to propagate new plants: using the earth to clean the air, filtering earth information in usable ways for different bodies.

The women who sell pottery have asked me to be their friend. First, an older woman, then a 13-year-old girl, who invited me for a meal on Sunday—I think at church, which is like an eight-hour affair. There is a very specific and interesting tradition of ceramics in Ghana. My friend Isobel, who is an amazing ceramics artist in Oakland, sent me an article about it without knowing my interest in it here. For various reasons, I do think people find my use of the pots odd, because like conceptual art, there is no concept for what I’m doing. The feeling is mutual: I lack the concepts to comprehend much of the practices here.

I was drinking a beer with some local kids in front of the tourist art market. They are Muslim and don’t drink, in case you were worried. There is no tourism here, but there is a place where you can get tourist craft items and swindle with the deal makers. When I want to talk about media art, I usually start by talking about film and music. One of the kids told me that there is a Tamale Filmmakers group that meets at the Tamale Cultural Center on Sunday mornings. I asked my Maltese friend, Christine, about it and she introduced me to Leonard (he goes by O.b.l.), the only filmmaker she knew here. Indeed, Sunday morning was the group meeting time. But this Sunday, Obl invited me to location for what he described as a shoot for an epic story. He means a feature-length fiction film. Of course, I accepted, and he arranged to pick me up. But, the ride would leave at 6am on a motorbike, for a drive to a tiny village, Takpili, outside of the tiny village Fuu, about 45 minutes from Tamale. Did I mention driving on motorbikes in Tamale traffic is terrifying and life-threatening? I couldn’t get myself up for the task—in a hyped up, not early morning, sort of way.

Dhubia, my taxi-driver friend drove me instead. Along the way, I saw a man in the middle of nowhere, wearing (what I later learned was) a dashiki suite—the most fly, slim-fitting monochromatic, cotton pants and long shirt set I’ve ever seen. When we arrived in Fuu, we had to ask for directions to Takpili. The villagers knew about the shoot, they wanted to come. Dhubia made one of the old women burst into laughter. He told me the joke later, I didn’t understand. Along the way to Takpili, a dirt road, there was a bushfire. It looked fine to me, but Dhubia was freaked out and we sat in the car for about 20 minutes to let it burn. Dhubia’s taxi does not have air conditioning. His five-year-old daughter was also with us, because he is a single dad. That appears to be rare here. Golden brown and red hawks stalked the fire while we waited.

When we arrived in Takpili, Obl and his crew were resting from the heat of the midday sun. They had completed a morning shoot and were going to do an interior shoot soon. The first thing Obl said to me was, “I didn’t think you were going to make it.” That made sense. I was pleased that this was his response, instead of the foreigner pulling up in a taxi who was unwilling to ride on the back of a motorbike for 45 minutes. Obl’s studio is super interesting. They shoot all sorts of projects, commercials, documentaries, and fiction. They train crew and actors and trade the education for work on independent film projects. Their goal is to bolster the baseline of the Tamale film industry. That industry, I think, is just them and the NORDRAFIM association, but they say their work has received Oscar evaluation. I reviewed some of their footage from the morning shoot—it was for real. They were in the second week of three to four weeks of production, living in the village Takpili. They were making a fictional film about witchcraft for a modern Tamale audience. The film follows a witchhunter—a “good” witch that uses their powers to find “evil” witches—and engages with the ethical complications of these categories. They were shooting in Takpili because it is one of the few remaining villages that still primarily has thatch-roof huts, as opposed to aluminum roofs. The film is in the local Dagbani language. Don’t be fooled by the signifiers of the image, the actors are “urban” Tamale residents portraying traditional villagers. The complexity of Obl producing the shoot at this location was, I confirmed, almost as complex as if I endeavored to do so. Different worlds all abound.

Media art is not film production, nor is it music. But, I’m taking the long road to finding media art practices in Northern Ghana. I’d like to see this as part of a larger commitment to decolonizing concepts, one that I take seriously with regards to infrastructures of standardization, such as concepts of time. It is entirely possible that the most interesting media art practices in Tamale happen by the minister—or his A/V person—at church or the chorus of sonic amplification of the call to prayer from the many mosques. I’ll go at some point, and try to figure that out. The point I mean to make here is that I want to take a closer look at what is meant when calling something media art. I’m less interested in the mediums that this involves, I’m already well convinced that life-exchange is media, whether that means shea butter, ceramics, air-filtering plants, or harmattan. Rather, I’m interested in the way that the concept of media art, and really art in general, carries a set of culturally informed place-based containers. In some ways, this is already quite obvious too, take the white cube of the gallery for instance, and even the artists’ studio. The history of western media art is one that sought to escape, and also to validate itself, as a practice outside of those domains. But, I mean something different here. I want to get at ontologies of life practice—the nature of the nature of things. When Northern Ghanaians talk about church here, it might not carry the same empirical categories of existence that they do when a Christian, or Muslim, in the U.S. talks about church or a Mosque.

Juju is a thing here, for example, and by that I mean Ghanaian witchcraft. It is a normal, common part of existence, for Christians, Muslims, the Dogamba, and everyone. Some of the women who I buy pottery from told me that I can find witches at the witchcamp outside of Tamale. These are places where women who have been given the scarlet letter, for some reason or another, are ostracized. They may be witches, they may not be, but these are places of punishment for socially unacceptable behavior—a vague and terrifying concept. Often, this means nothing more than a widow who does not have a husband and thus has been labeled a witch. So, when is Juju “good” and when is it “bad”? I’m not sure; it seems fluid and grounded in a conceptual framing of the world—an ontology—that is simultaneously expansive with regards to what is, animist, exploratory, etc., and confoundingly restrictive, conservative, and traditionalist.

In this space, what is called media art—that is, an exploration of the aesthetics, ethics, and possibilities of media technologies, infrastructures, histories, materialities, and more—might very well be occurring as part of some practice I lack a conceptual relationship to and thus lack a capacity to comprehend. I hope so. I will keep looking. I think, what I am seeking, is not a thing, but rather a set of relationships to ground me with/in. Maybe a “grounding” is the wrong metaphor. When I find the right metaphor, I’ll be closer to understanding.

The Sunday after the film shoot, I went to the NORDRAFIM meeting. Obl had informed them I would be coming and introduced me to one of the association’s presidents, but when I arrived, I stepped into a room of about 50 Ghanaians watching a group of models training to do a fashion catwalk. It was unexpected. There is something wonderful about a small collective in a remote city working all together on film industry skill sets. You don’t typically have cinematographers and directors participating in the same workshops as beginner fashion-model walking, for instance. I was unprepared for this. But, the president introduced me, a kind gesture because he did so in English despite otherwise speaking in Dagbani. They asked me to say a few words about my work. Then, I walked that catwalk.

Towards Cosmic Multi-species Relations and why "My Octopus Teacher" is Not Good Enough.

The Oscar for Best Documentary that My Octopus Teacher won illustrates just how far Western modern perceptions of nature still have to go. On the surface, this film presents a triumphant, if not unexpected, kinship between two unlikely species: land-dwelling “man” and aquatic octopus.

It is well documented that octopuses are exceptionally intelligent beings and the story of encounters between one depressed Afrikaner man and the therapeutic ocean provides an intimate portrait of two creatures somewhat out of their element (so to speak). Filmmaker Craig Foster has amazing lungs and stamina; and the submerged salty world he cinematically captures is seductive. And yet, this is just the point: the film illustrates how easily humans are convinced of their own representation of things when presented with wonderment and awe for the sublime unknown. I am underwhelmed that my fellow humans are so easily guided into this perspective. I too spend significant time in a cold ocean and value world-building with multi-species kinfolk.

I’d like to turn to perhaps the most important narrative device within the documentary: the use of the octopus’s attack and subsequent loss of limbs which functions as both a catalyst for different sub narratives and the development of tension in the film. Despite the prevailing message that Foster and the octopus are friends offering mutual support, this is mostly a glamorous proposition by a depressed man. The relationship certainly seems to be one-directional. Is it not the goal of any meaningful bond to offer oneself wholly to the other? In fact, he is of the shittiest of friends. Imagine that you are coerced out of your safe home because a strange visitor who you partially trust arrives at your doorstep and as a result you are attacked by some predator, only to see your friend disappear under the embarrassing credo of human nonintervention into so-called nature? As though humans are not organic earthly entities; as though all the gallivanting around in the octopus's backyard, filming her, touching her, is nonintervention; as though the very premise of the Anthropocene, a geologic epoch in which humanity has irrecoverably influenced the entire earth system, however incomplete of an idea, is not a clear bellwether of the entangled conditions of nature and culture. Foster is more than happy to intervene when it serves his interest of a pretty shot—the worst kind of documentary work.

It is an under-examined component of the film that the very first sequence, this otherwise remarkable and potentially queer adornment that the octopus uses as a strategy to hide from predators, may in part also have been caused due to the filmmaker’s aloof presence in the ocean at that time. Instead of utilizing screen time to reflect on this, the filmmaker ogles at the beauty and awe that another entity besides humans utilizes its environment in a technical and aesthetic way. Most disappointingly, this observation, however uncritical, is deployed narratively as a form of poetics of reflection and recuperation for Foster. In other words, the representation of the octopus and of their friendship is refashioned for the purpose of self-improvement of the filmmaker. What I learn from this film is that I can inhabit other creature’s homes and risk their lives if it gives me peace of mind.

What feels particularly lacking in the Academy’s choice is that there is so much interesting writing, filmmaking, and art about human/nature entanglements right now. The high priestess of speculative fiction and Afrofuturism, Octavia Butler, is finally beginning to receive the popular attention she has deserved. Her Xenogenesis Trilogy offers a rich and nuanced interpretation of humanity, technology, and life, through the lens of trauma, slavery, multi-species kinship, and space travel. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Jenny Odell, artist and author of How To Do Nothing, has been thinking with birds for some time; Elisabeth Nicula’s similar kinship with her scrub jay friend, whom she nicknamed Frank, was a multi-year relationship documented through more than 80,000 photographs. Ecosexuals Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkles, long-time queer environmental artists and activists, have actualized a performative route for making love with the earth. They readily admit the anthropocentrizing of the Earth that their work does. But, the point is they utilize this as a strategy to engage a complex ethics of shared cohabitation and love for this planet. All of these artists actively cultivate the perspective that representations of nature are not just environmental issues, but are fundamentally entrenched in racial, colonial, and gendered power relationships. Feminist philosopher Donna Haraway, author of the Companion Species Manifesto has been thinking with other kinfolk for some time. In her 2016 book, Staying With The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene she says, “It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems” (Haraway 2016, 101).

Instead of the kind of transformative meditation on Western human’s sense of entitlement to define what nature is, the film offers the portrait of a white guy who feels bad and seeks a multi-species entity to displace emotional labor on to (even if the emotional labor is purely of the representational sort). This film could have done some deep work in the water to re-orient how a multi-species ethics of care and maintenance might look—an octopus ethics—or the Oscar’s could have chosen a documentarian who is actually doing this, such as Ursula Biemann, among others.

Unfortunately, My Octopus Teacher only momentarily disrupts the all too common perception that humans are the center of all things. Once the distraction of our own amazement that an organism other than humans might actually have the capacity for culture, friendship, and emotions subsides, the film quickly reminds us that prevailing modern human values will quickly abandon planetary kin the moment it’s post as rulers of the cosmos is challenged.

With the Academy deeming this film the best in its class, it’s so crucial that this argument is taken up to continue reminding the Western human inhabitants of this rare Earth that multi-species relationships and stewardship of the planet must come from the perspective that humanity does not define the value of other entities.