This film is also part of a series of poem-films I have been creating as a subset of my Graphology poetry cycle/project that has been going since the mid-90s. As mentioned in the prior posting, these films are subsections of a 'feature-length' experimental movie that is focalised through the poet Hölderlin, glasshouses, gardens, colonialism, AI, animal rights, industrialism and climate degradation, and issues of environment, human rights and 'place'.
This 'section' arose out of living near the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (oh, the irony!), and investigating the vivisection that ultimately underpins so much Max Planck laboratory research (by varying degrees of separation, or not). Via The German Reference Centre for Ethics in the Life Sciences (DRZE) website, see.
Recently, I wrote to one prominent university neuroscientist to object to his inserting electrodes into crows' brains to 'show conscious processes in bird brains'. And though there's been a relatively recent shift in the use/abuse of primates by the Max Planck research facilities (I wrote protest-intervention poems about this horrendous abuse when I was in Tübingen in 2016), the disregard for non-human life goes deep (always 'justified' as being for the ultimate benefit of 'humankind', while disclaiming the suffering of the animals themselves through deploying hierarchical and abusive/demeaning speciesist arguments). For a deeply disturbing article regarding the lengths vivisectors will go to to keep their death programmes functioning, see this.
There's also a figurative (and literal via the observatory dome which is almost the omphalos of the institute) astronomical subtext... when I was a child, I wanted to be an astronomer... as the power plant in the 'background' spews waste. The underlying 'soundtrack' or 'voice-under' is Emily Brontë's poem 'No Coward Soul is Mine'.
John Kinsella
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