Solastalgia

In this presentation, we present our recent year-long collaborative work in what Steve Mentz calls “the blue humanities” – thinking about the climate emergency in relation to twinned problems of water and fire. We’ll first contextualize our intention as it emerged from our work with the feminist research creation Decameron Collective. We will then demonstrate how we have been using SCALAR to create an interactive documentary/research creation project that employs a range of analogue and digital documentary practices which include book making, watercoloring, embodied documentary filmmaking, and augmented reality, anchoring our approaches in theories of embodiment (“the role of the felt sense and the body politic primarily in the process of making documentary films, and secondarily in the film’s subject matter, role in the media landscape, and impact of process on the filmmaker,”( Monde)) asking what do our bodies already know about climate change?, as well as eco-theory notions of Solastalgia, that is, the distress caused by environmental change (Albrecht et al.), exploring the research questions our experimentations both crystallized and obscured. We will demonstrate how we have used the affordances of Scalar to create an interactive, living, creative and data-driven assemblage to deepen our connections and understanding of global and personal events. Ultimately, our goal will be to provide an assessment of what, if anything, these errant “methods” offer interactive film and media studies, as well as idocs practice and methodologies.