"Technology, acceleration do not affect our way of living - they are, in effect, our new and comprehensive host of life, the environment of living itself. It is not the effect of technology on the environment, culture, economy, religion, etc., but rather that all these categories exist in technology. In this sense technology is new nature. The living environment, old nature, is replaced by a manufactured milieu, an engineered host - synthetic nature. In a real sense, we are off planet, dwelling on a lunar surface of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, steel and plastics, engulfed in the atmosphere of electromagnetic vibrations - the soothing lullaby of the machine. The common notion tells us that technology is neutral, that we can use it for either good or bad. From the p.o.v. of NAQOYQATSI, we do not use technology, we live technology; technology is our way of life. Being sensate entities, we become our environment - we become what we see, what we hear, what we eat, what we smell, what we touch. Where doubt is prohibited, we become, without question, the environment we live in. With our origins based in the natural order, should this context radically change (as I am suggesting), the mysterious nature of the human being shall also radically change - a change that will reflect the transformation of nature itself, at a turning point or vanishing point. Natural diversity becomes a burnt offering, sacrificed to the infinite appetite of technological homogenization.
So forget science fiction. We now live the fiction of science. We are now, not in some remote future, cyborgs. We are at one with our environment - we are technology. In this wonderland, freedom becomes the pursuit of our technological happiness. Our standard of living is predicated on commodity consumption, as the shibboleth of the new religion is 'pray for more'. In vehicles of ecstasy, with cinematic engines of inertia at audiovisual speed, trans-port and tele-port blend into one. The beginning becomes the end. The port disappears in the speed of light. The nanosecond (one billionth of an 'old second'), technological speed, transforms reality as it creates an ecstatic phenomena of compelling and unparalleled intensity. By human measure, charismatic technique portends the miraculous, as it engenders the condition of 'exit velocity' - a condition that blurs human perceptions, shatters all meanings, drains all content and breaks our bonds to earth. All locations are subsumed into the startling terra firma of the image, a demonic conformity that is the genesis of massman. In the shadow of the mass, all previous definitions crumble. The 'time' and 'space' of history exit to an homogenized zone of no return. In this supernatural implosion of g-force, human moorings give way, sending Homo sapiens out-of-orbit into the void of technological space. The accompanying loss of original habitat and our subsequent relocation into accelerated space, throws nature into catastrophe, as it engenders traumatic stress syndrome as the now normal condition of post-human existence. Technique, while promising comfort and happiness, means power, means control, means conformity, means destiny. Technology creates a condition of war that is at once universal and unseen. The explosive tempo of technology is war; the un-tellable violence of relocation in technology is war. All of us are refugees driven from our human state.
As the completion of the Qatsi trilogy, NAQOYQATSI offers a cinematic concert to experience the allurement, seduction and sanctioned terror of ordinary daily living - a world at war beyond the battlefield, a conflagration between old and new nature - total war. The vision of NAQOYQATSI is a world made in the image and likeness of the new divine, the computer - a world where unity is held in the vice of technological homogenization, the globalized world of techno-fascism, the age of civilized violence.
It must be noted that the production of NAQOYQATSI employs the very medium that it questions. In doing so, we embrace the contradiction of using technology to question technology. Given the intention of the film is to commune, to connect, we employ the franca lingua of the technological order - what Baudrillard terms 'the evil demon of images'. The image becomes our location. We relocate onto the image, onto our venerated familiar, the iconic, as we reshuffle the deck to offer an iconoclastic experience in the form of a film. Indeed, the subject of NAQOYQATSI is itself the manufactured image, a horizonless digital landscape, devoid of reality yet full of promise. The tools that produced the film are themselves our subject."
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