Imaginary Planets

For whom is this earth,
this usurped land, its grape clusters
one by one made to fall,
the land stormed by countries league on league,
its open spaces hedgehogged by spears,
this land unstrung from wounds
like some prey run down in the palms

…for whom?
—Muhammad Afifi Matar, translated by Ferial Ghazoul and John Verlenden

Our planet is shrugging like a cow with fleas! Some of these movies immerse us the point of view of life left to its own devices. Others indulge in the pleasures of wanton destruction and the evolution of splendid/terrifying new forms. It’s been a fun ride but it’s time to spin off—right, Elon and Jeff? 
—LM

Phoebe Legere, To the Moon Catfish
USA, 2021, 0:17, 4.295 MB, processing time 0:07

Nothing pairs better than absurdity and infomercials! Legere commentates on media propaganda and consumerism through the planted aspirations of an adolescent catfish.—SB

Superogue – Marquee Design (Martijn), Blake 32
Netherlands, 2021, 0:48, 32 bytes,

A flight over parallax clouds reminiscent of post-anthropogenic skies not unlike our own.—JM

48 second Screen capture of 32 byte executable,

here are the Hexidecimal (4 hexidecimal letters = 2 byte) codes that make up this file:

   B013 CD10 C407 B4CC F7E7 B010 7201 4064
   1316 6C04 28D6 D0E2 10F2 73F0 AAEB E590

Elysia Bourne and Ross Birdwise, fuzzy time series
Canada, 2021, 5:00, 3.8 MB, processing time 7:11

Time is not one anymore; it explodes into vacuoles bestowed with different gifts. What time is it? A crackling, sizzling time. A polka dot time. A time drunk from a fountain of particles.—RP 

Monique Motut-Firth & pr0phecy sun, Pocket Theatre (Covid Collaborations: In the Beginning; A Common Thread; Next of Days; Directives; Planet B; System Malfunction )
Canada, 2020-2021, series length 4:50, series size 6.46 MB

Jérémy Griffaud, Ultra Low Series: From There and Nowhere Chronicles; The Best Landscape; Landstrength; Dreamland; Poèmes
France, 2018-2020, series length 10:18, series size 24 MB

Griffaud’s series envisions a cheery, candy-colored apocalypse, the logical outcome of the military-industrial complex. To the upbeat squelches of NkDm, a hyper-capitalist surveys his domain with satisfaction, ignoring the acid clouds and absent crowds. It seems there’s nobody left to celebrate the missile launches, megastores, highrises, and traffic roundabouts that contain what remains of the land. But some radioactive revenge ensues from within!

In The Best Landscape, as though fed from our world’s nuclear-decayed remains, a post-apocalyptic terrain takes shape. Mysterious tissue births and destroys itself. Flying vegetation transforms into H-bombs and missiles. Later in Landstrength, nourished by the heavy acid rain, a lushly weaponized landscape has evolved, forming a stable new ecosystem. What human DNA remains has transcoded into mutant brainless bodies. And what does this mutant territory dream of? Working out! Finally—or is it in the beginning?—a lone trapped creature gallops on the shore, neighing mournfully in a looped poem to all we will have lost.—LM At once a cynical cosmogony and mean apocalypse, serialised as small-file cantos of sorts. Toxic candy floss landscapes rise and break, capitalist infrastructures mushroom and suffocate, nauseating cesspools of media images overflow, and a horse gallops forever in technicolor tropics. – RP