'Rehousing Technosphere': speculating life and its movements after a cosmic event

The choreographed beginning of the end—an apocalypse, alien invasion, or a world-altering cosmic event are all matters of mass speculation. Though the Mayan calendar and different religious books talk of a particular timeline for this, there is no certainty to this timeline, just an understated looming understanding that the end is inevitable. Therefore, for fiction storytellers, this genre has been a favourite—the world after the end, the survival of human life, the mutation in human genes and the natural world. While a lot of these stories or movies hope to create awareness around the importance of saving the planet from alarming situations like climate crisis, global warming, war etc, more often, than not, they only manage to ignite a few hours of introspection, eventually seizing to exist as only dramatic visual or literary narratives.

When an exaggerated version of the end of the world doesn't scare humans, one wouldn't expect the mutated fictional future of other organisms to do the trick. When I read the introduction to Wang & Söderström’s 3D animated film, Rehousing Technosphere, I was in for almost six minutes of intriguing creative animation. But to my surprise, it wasn’t simply a good film with extremely impressive animation but one that makes you restless. You do not expect a speculative animated film that showcases Earth in a distant future, after a cosmic event, and the subsequent mutations in unfamiliar organisms to make you uneasy about an undetermined future. The colours, patterns, and textures on the mutated creature appear real enough to evoke a tactile sense just by visually consuming it.

"Earth has been home to humanity for around two hundred thousand years–a fraction of the geological time scale. Yet in this short slice of habitation, our imprint has been so vast, so palpable, that some now describe the littered layer of human-generated structures and systems as the ‘technosphere.’ This is a quickly evolving stratum of neo-geologic time and one that, unlike the biosphere, is comparatively deficient in recycling its own materials,” share the Copenhagen-based artist and design duo Anny Wang and Tim Söderström, who created the short animated film.

The five minute 42 seconds of Rehousing Technosphere begin at a time far ahead in the future 'Gaea 112358 p.A.’ In the ‘desert-like’ world, where the land is reflective, small polished ball-like structures protrude from the surface in clusters, in what appears to be mutated cactuses standing on the mirror-like land. The introduction to this world is rather subtle, it’s surprising and exciting but still distinguishable as unreal and artificial. The frame then shifts to a moving waterbody where the water and sky have become one white dynamic backdrop, in which floats a dry wooden branch with blurred blue patches, while still feeling earthy. And then the story slowly unfolds narrating:

A cosmic event led to immense temperature changes.

This is where the Earth of the distant future that Wang & Söderström mention earlier comes to life. A colourful furry caterpillar crawling on a tiny wooden branch appears. From this calm and composed representation, unexpectedly the frame moves to a chaotic waterbody.

Storms in which most of the materials have been merged and remixed, and even some physical laws rewritten.

The reality of the catastrophic results of the cosmic event slowly unfolds. Even while the background symphony flows slowly, the waves don’t settle and continue to visually rustle. Amid the strong waves, some objects float and sink. From the appearance of it, one cannot accept those objects to be living organisms, but at the same time, one cannot deny that possibility. In the next frame, the same water becomes still and a wobbly creature moves across it, creating waves. The two frames thereby reveal an irony, making you question 'which among the both is the dominant power— the water or the living?' In a sense, the water become symbolic of the energy which when contained is harmless but when overused, consumes all. This symbolism, with the differing temperaments of water, continues in the next few frames, raising the question of whether the liquid is water or a visually beautiful but destructive liquid. After the introduction of the 'water of the future Earth,' the scientific layers of the ‘technosphere’ come into play which the narrator defines as:

Prolonged exposure to solar radiation generated a thin layer of noble gas, resulting in the creation of a new planetary crust.
Most organisms have disappeared but some have adapted and new ones are developing.

A cluster of small molecular skin collapses, imagined to be catastrophic, it is symbolic of melting glaciers and shifting tectonic plates, but the textures, colour palette, forms and flow transforms it into a set of rebirth. From this emerges new creatures—living, breathing, moving and growing. The new life thus formed from the decay is unidentifiable. From a tree-shaped structure, an egg-like form disassociates and rolls downhill a contoured surface. Before you see the form rest, the frame shifts to a blob-shaped translucent figure, making its way through a mutated form of grass. From here on, life happens, and the storyline moves from introducing new creatures to how they live, survive, grow, die and get born again.

Today, life is abundant there.
A mishmash of raw and refined fossil material, organic fabrics, synthesised pieces of rare metals and minerals, melted into a plethora of shapes and textures.
Each responding to their own cycle, they migrate with the current of magnetic waves.
Stagnation or rooting in a certain place is not an option in this fluctuating world.
Life needs to move.
Here, it's perhaps the very definition of life, movement.
What stops, dies and passes from life to something to live on.
A habitat for those who need to live.

Towards the end of the video, you witness a new world unfold, a ‘new normal’ taking shape. The end of the ‘ending’ and a new beginning. At the end is a frame where the egg-like form which was earlier rolling downhill is still. It is human nature to anticipate the familiar, even while witnessing a world unknown, expecting the egg to crack and a new life to be born, without realising that ‘this world’ rejects any human rules. The film ends on this cliffhanger, open to the subjective interpretation of whether the egg cracks or not, hanging us in a thread of ‘hope.’

Rehousing Technosphere, in a very playful, surreal and whimsical manner makes you think, speculate the NEXT and transcend that expectation. In ‘this’ world, humans don’t make the rules, nature does. Nature that is not dictated by mankind. The almost six minutes of the animation film, instigate serious thoughts on the future of the planet. Probing deep into the thought and zooming out from the life of the smaller organisms, in the world after a large-scale cosmic event, what will become of humans?