“As glaciers melt, deltas flood, and we row our lifeboats down the middle of the River Anthropocene, it seems we need any valuable tool we can muster to negotiate the rising tide pushing in from the sea.” (Neimanis 2017, p. 26)

My purpose is to recover the sense of what it means to inhabit the world. (Ingold 2008, p. 1797)

This work is 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 to inquire into the climate emergency.

It began from feelings of overwhelm at the scale of the polycrisis we are facing. We keep finding ourselves, to put it simply, flooded. Our response is therefore anchored 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? The conceptual cornerstone of the work comes from eco-theoretical notions of "solastalgia," that is, the distress caused by environmental change (Albrecht et al.).

The Scalar ecology allows us to create an interactive, intertextual, living, creative and data-driven assemblage to deepen our connections and understanding of global and personal events. Linking out to other art works and news stories, and building in maps and monitors allows us to ensure Ultimately, our goal is to feel our way into a model or “method” that emerges from interactive film and media studies, as well as idocs practice and methodologies, but also Walter Benjamin's Passagenwerk, for thinking and feeling our way into the climate crisis.

There are multiple pathways through the work:
The Water Series collects work about the threat of flooding and sea rise.
The Fire Series collects works about forest fires.
(Meta)reflections represents our dialogue, in the tradition of the epistolary narrative as well as the philosophical dialogue, finding common ground.
Readers can also follow a non-linear path.