<nettime> Soviet Antarctica: Ice, Ice, baby...

["Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@earthlink.net>]

Hi folks - sorry to be brief, but I'm writing this on my cell phone in the mountains of Umbria, Italy.

A quick response:

1) No, I don't support oppressive Communist regimes. The issue for me was that many European (and some non European - like Imperial Japan, South Africa, Argentina, the U.S., Chile, China etc) regimes throughout the last couple of centuries have projected various competitive political, economic, and ideological agendas onto Antarctica. My film explores these issues - as a scripted response to the fictional claims of territory various "great powers" made on Antarctic territories. The Soviet Union did this too! But it doesn't exist anymore, so I thought it was a great metaphor for the ever shifting geopolitical landscape the ice responds to. Think: territorial claims of a vanished nation state. It's kind of like the poem "Ozymandias."

Before commenting further, you might want to check out the trailer:
http://www.djspooky.com/art/terra_nova.php

2) Yes, I know Stanislaw (or sometimes, it's spelled Stanislav) Lem was Polish. I specifically said Soviet - Poland, after all was a member of the Warsaw Pact - it doesn't necessarily talk about ethnicity. Soviet could have been Turks, Uighurs, Kazakhs, Ukranians, Kurds, Georgians, etc. 

Boris and Arkady Strugatsky were Russian. Stalin, for example, was Georgian. There's a difference.

Thanx for your comments though!
Paul

ps, everyone calls me Paul

-----Original Message-----

From:  Elena Razlogova <erazlogo@gmu.edu>
Subj:  Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Soviet Antarctica: Ice, Ice, baby...
Date:  Sat Jul 12, 2008 10:21 am
Size:  1K
To:  Nettime-l <nettime-l@kein.org>

> anansi5000@gmail.com (Tue 07/08/08 at 08:21 AM -0400):
>
>> Here goes: it's going to be in the style of a silent movie - we have
>> weird footage of the first Soviet expedition, and it will be a kind
>> of science fiction type intermission in the middle of my film -
>> very "propaganda" a la Stanislav Lem's Solaris or Boris and Arkady
>> Strugatsky - two of the Soviet Union's top science fiction writers.
>> By the way, all of the text below will be translated into old school
>> Soviet propaganda fonts for the film.
>
> Spooky, I know it's hard to tell all those ex-Easterners apart with
> their crazy writing and all, but Lem was Polish. How does conflating
> Poland and the USSR fit in with the past views you've expressed on
> various kinds of oppressive relations?

Yes but Solaris the movie (1972, based on Lem's book) was directed by  
Andrei Tarkovsky who is indeed Russian.

Elena


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