By Matt Dowse
Here at the Centre for Sociodigital Futures we’ve convened a speculative fiction reading group about Community Technology with friends outside the university that we know are practicing Community Technology and co-creators from the Centre for Creative Technology. We’ve worked in various ways to come together to experiment with ideas about community/technology/and community technology. All of these ideas are feeding into the research that we are doing and are planning to do in the future. Through the reading group we have engaged with Octavia Butler Octavia E Butler: Visionary black sci-fi writer – BBC World Service, Witness History (youtube.com), Adrienne Maree Brown adrienne maree brown – awe. liberation. pleasure. , and Mother Cyborg About — MOTHER CYBORG so far. Watching Neptune Frost was the group’s first exploration in to film.
Codirected by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, who originally conceived the film as a stage play and musical, Neptune Frost provides us with an insight into diverse ways of thinking about technology and its relationship to societies of the present and the near future. With its DIY-stuck-together-headdress-Techno-sci-fi-aesthetic the film presents an interwoven and entangled vision of Community and Technology. Here, in the dreamscape and drama that the film creates, tech is on the surface, worn, visible, and powerful, giving agency to the community that the film imagines.
Political narrative
The story begins with a burial, then a journey of dreaming and escape. Along the way, there is an explicit narrative about labour rights and the extraction of minerals for use in the tech of the global north (in song and dance), urging us to think about power and the dynamics of extraction, labour exploitation, power imbalances, geographies, and violence. In one section, a character says “they (that is the extractive powers/global north) communicate through our blood and sweat.” From within this deeply political narrative structure, the film projects moments of magic, love, intimacy, and the power of relationships. Alongside, there are laugh-out-loud moments, contrasted with brutal mining landscapes, battered trees adorned with reused and unused broken tech, and straight to camera challenges and demands. These tensions generate provoking songs, group dances, psychedelic junk filled dreamscapes, and complex character development.
Entangled characters
The film presents the hacker character Neptune as the source of catalytic change and the bringer of power to their community once they are joined with Matalosa (a coltan miner), the film’s other narrator and principal character. In part, this union suggests how knowledge of tech (the wisdom of Neptune) can engage with demands for equality and justice (from Matalosa after the murder of his brother Techno by a guard in the mines). Here, both characters must come together to make change happen (to take over the internet!), each needing what the other has to give. They are both freedom fighters who are heroic together, in moments that are touching, joyous, intense, and often visually spectacular. The whole film is beautifully filmed with scenes in bright colours, neon lights and costumes, peppered with technical talk and strange props – like bicycle wheels on old tent poles – all of which give an unnerving sense of an inevitable and inescapable junk riddled future. Or the fear that, at any moment, all might just fall apart. These dissonances and resolutions run through the film, shifting the narrative along from its odd beginning to its all too familiar end.
The Future?
It takes some time at the beginning of the film to realize that there are elements of the future present: we see a transparent game boy like device; towers of shattered keyboards; people who appear to have arms and hands made of the bits and bobs of tech; and clothes somehow held together with tech laden materials made of wires and circuit boards. All of this is somehow so familiar on the one hand, but out of place on the other. Although the film presents a vision of a broken, horrid, and extractive present/future it does so within a story of wonder, magic, and hope, bringing different visions of technologies and how we might think about those technologies into being by disrupting old narratives and creating the possibility of potent new futures where communities take control and demand the end of exploitation and alienation.
This anti-capitalist, sci-fi musical ends quite badly for almost all the characters in it but, at the same time, suggests a sequel founded on hope and what might be possible (perhaps it’s us who have to make the sequel… to take on the challenges that are explored here).
The film encourages us to understand that struggle is cyclical and that we should never give up, nodding towards hope and resistance, giving us some way of thinking differently about the Community Technology of the present, its purpose, and the possibilities for change that it urges us to imagine.
Neptune Frost is available to watch on streaming platforms.
Our reading group is open to anyone interested in thinking about community technology through futures speculations. We hold monthly hybrid meetings open to colleagues and friends both inside and outside of the University.
If you would like to join us, contact matt.dowse@bristol.ac.uk
For more information on the work of the Centre for Sociodigital Futures, join our mailing list, follow us on X and LinkedIn or visit our webpage.