Field of repose

This essay documents the investigative and theoretical underpinnings of my thesis film, Field of Repose. Field of Repose is a speculative essay film that uses elements of science fiction and documentary to investigate hidden ecological networks of communication in the American Midwest. In this speculative world, the relationship between nature, technology, and society is radically restructured; it imagines a future in which the changing climate and environmental conditions are recast as an active resistance to nature’s own devastation. Using environmental realities already at play in the state of Iowa and beyond, the film defamiliarizes scenes of the present and charges them with dystopian elements. In so doing, Field of Repose dismantles imperialistic and anthropocentric motifs in science fiction and invites viewers to enter an anarchic web of feedback and response in which the essay film’s omniscient narrator is replaced by a cacophony of orphaned radio signals that pollute the air. Plants, earth’s first communicators, are now its last. Humanity is but a blip.