The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018

The most accessible introduction to the life and work of James Lovelock, and a guide to address today's "polycrisis."

There is no creation of the future if we do not sustain, at root, an intuition for invention. No one understood this better than James Lovelock, the most significant scientific thinker since Charles Darwin.

Over the course of his career, Lovelock set the terms by which we've come to understand life—biologically, societally, poetically—in the twenty-first century. He helped NASA complete missions to Mars and the moon; he invented devices that revealed the presence of harmful chemicals in the Earth's atmosphere, inspiring Rachel Carson to write Silent Spring; and he formulated the Gaia hypothesis, the deceptively simple idea that our planet could be viewed as a single self-regulating organism—everything entangled, everything acting upon everything else.

In September 2015, Hans Ulrich Obrist traveled to Dorset to visit Lovelock at his seaside cottage, where they spent nine hours discussing garden cities, frozen hamsters, rising temperatures, tiny widgets, the Space Age, the birth of modern science, the agonies of institutions, and the future of humanity. Ever Gaia presents this conversation as a celebration of Lovelock, who died in 2022 at 103, alongside contributions from two future pioneers of Gaia: Daisy Hildyard and Precious Okoyomon. As another of Lovelock's heirs, Tim Lenton, writes in his afterword, this encounter was pivotal in Lovelock's late intellectual life and, at the start of 2023, provides a guide—by way of Lovelock's Gaian approach—to address today's "polycrisis."

Ever Gaia opens the second season of isolarii as a tribute not just to Lovelock but to the late Bruno Latour, who introduced the series when we launched it two years ago. The second volume of a trilogy that started with the release of The Archipelago Conversations in 2021, Ever Gaia is the most accessible introduction to the life and work of Lovelock, whose way of seeing—"perhaps his greatest legacy," Obrist writes—will continue to shape our world and our place within it for decades to come.

“What happened to my book?”

This was the last email we received from Nick, in December 2021. A short, concise demand, which we responded to, telling him that the transcription was coming soon and that Marie was finalising the introduction. Little did we know, what Nick surely already knew: he was dying. The urgency should have given it away, but Nick was always blunt in our email exchanges.

Nick passed away on February 27th, 2022. We regret not getting the transcription to him while he could still edit it, so this book in your hands remains an unabridged testament.

The only thing he did edit were his final words, in an unsolicited email in September 2021:

“I was thinking about when you asked me if I had any final words, that it would be better to have me say: Freedom or death. At the crossroads. With a key.”

So we leave you with this; a homage to the legendary founder of the Cinema Of Transgression - a brilliant artist, a sharp mind, a loving father, a kind revolutionary, a boot stamping on the face of modernity forever, an underground phenomenon.
Nick Zedd, rest in peace.

[Note by the publisher.]

With a foreword by Goswell Road. Includes a conversation with Nick Zedd, and the manifesto 'Cinema of Transgression'.

Softcover (11 cm x 18 cm)
84 Pages
75 copies
Language : English

REWIND PLAY presents a selection of key works from the first decade of artist's video practice in the UK. From early conceptual experiments exploring the parameters of the medium to works dealing with media culture and television this collection explores the range and diversity of the first years of video as new media.

This three DVD box set including 24 videos by: John Adams, Peter Anderson, Kevin Atherton, Ian Bourn, Ian Breakwell, David Critchley, Peter Donebauer, Catherine Elwes, Judith Goddard, David Hall, Mick Hartney, Brian Hoey/Wendy Brown, Madelon Hooykaas/ Elsa Stansfield, Tina Keane, Tamara Krikorian, Mike Leggett, Stephen Littman, Stuart Marshall, Chris Meigh-Andrews/ Gabrielle Bown, Marcelline Mori, Stephen Partridge, Clive Richardson and Tony Sinden. Plus a new essay by Sean Cubitt, Professor of Media and Communications, University of Melbourne.

Total running time: 336 minutes. 3 x DVD 9, PAL, Region 0

Published in collaboration with REWIND| Artists' Video in the 70s and 80s.

Disc 1:
Stories, John Adams (1982, 13 min) Eyebath Peter Anderson (1977, 8 min) In Two Minds (2 screen version) Kevin Atherton (1978, 25 min) Lenny's Documentary Ian Bourn (1978, 45 min) In the Home Ian Breakwell (1980, 10 min)

Disc 2:
Pieces I Never Did (3 screen version), David Critchley (1979, 31 min) Circling, Peter Donebauer (1975, 12 min) Kensington Gore, Catherine Elwes (1981, 15 min) Time Spent, Judith Goddard (1981, 12 min) TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces), David Hall (1971, 23 min) State of Division, Mick Hartney (1978, 5 min) The Extent of Three Bells, Steve Hawley (1981, 5 min) Flow, Brian Hoey/Wendy Brown (1977, 17 min)

Disc 3:
Split Seconds, Madelon Hooykaas/ Elsa Stansfield (1979, 11 min) Clapping Songs, Tina Keane (1979, 6 min) Vanitas, Tamara Krikorian (1977, 8 min) The Heart Cycle, Mike Leggett (1973, 9 min) Mirror, Stephen Littman (1979, 5 min) Go thru the Motions, Stuart Marshall (1975, 8 min) Continuum, Chris Meigh Andrews/Gabrielle Bown (1977 5 min) 2nd and 3rd Identity, Marcelline Mori (1978, 10 min) Monitor, Stephen Partridge (1975, 6 min) Video Sketches, Clive Richardson (1972, 22 min) Drift Guitars, Tony Sinden (1975 21 min)

Published in collaboration with Harun Farocki Institut, this book unpacks About Narration [Erzählen], a 1975 essay film directed by Ingemo Engström and Harun Farocki.

Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert, this book focuses on About Narration [Erzählen] directed by Ingemo Engström and Harun Farocki.
It includes the film's script alongside the historical documents related to its making and Farocki's previously unpublished theoretical and programmatic essay on the film. The publication also includes a retrospective essay by Ingemo Engström on the film's political and artistic background.

Volker Pantenburg's detailed elaboration of the conditions of its making, alongside Boynik and Holert's concluding remarks, further contextualizes the film. The interview with Cathy Porter on Larisa Reisner, a heroine of About Narration, gives an overview of the life of a militant writer who inspired Engström and Farocki.

Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert.

Building on previous projects centered on the pedagogy of poets, and friendship through correspondence, LOST & FOUND SERIES VII breaks new ground to present unpublished and presently unavailable materials by novelist, filmmaker, and activist Toni Cade Bambara; iconic poet-activist-teachers Audre Lorde and June Jordan; scholar, activist, and poet Dr. Jack D. Forbes, and letters between North American poet and translator Paul Blackburn and Argentinian in exile novelist, poet, and translator Julio Cortázar.

While Cortázar and Blackburn forged their own institution of sorts, through a friendship that would help ignite the Latin American boom, Forbes, Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde worked in and out of institutions to help transform the landscape of our educational and historical horizons and expectations. For some years Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde all taught together in the City University of New York, the largest urban system in the United States, collaborating with activist students and other faculty to create new curriculum in Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Women's Studies. At the same time, Blackburn also taught part-time at City University, while bringing the vision of another world into American English, through his translations of Cortázar, a champion of the Cuban revolution and a writer of unparalleled influence in Latin America. On the other side of the country, Dr. Jack Forbes's vision of hemispheric Indigenous life was brought to bear on his involvement in the creation of D-Q University, the first Indigenous university in California, as well as the creation of Native American Studies at UC Davis, a program that would be emulated at other universities in North America. At the same time, his extraordinary and almost unknown poetry, featured here along with notable materials on his educational activism, presents a vision of Los Angeles cutting across race, class, and ethnicity that the work of all the writers in this Series help us realize.

SERIES VII Includes:

Audre Lorde
"I teach myself in outline," Notes, Journals, Syllabi, & an Excerpt from Deotha 

Toni Cade Bambara
"Realizing the Dream of a Black University," & Other Writings (Parts I & II)

June Jordan
"Life Studies," 1966-1976 

Jack Forbes
"Yanga Ya," Selected Poems & The Goals of Education 

Paul Blackburn & Julio Cortázar
"Querido Pablito"/"Julissimo Querido," Selected Correspondence, 1958-1971 (Parts I & II)