Spaceship Earth
Matt Wolf | USA | 2020
| Director: Matt Wolf Producer: Matt Wolf Cinematography: Sam Wootton Editor: David Teague Music: Owen Pallett |
Rating: M offensive language Runtime: 113 minutes
“I think the whole project – I mean, I really liked that it was science fiction without the fiction”
— Biospherian Mike Nelson, AKA “Horse Sh*t”
In 2020, as the world plunged headfirst into the Covid-19 pandemic and quarantine, having just witnessed the devastation of the Australian bushfires, a documentary titled Spaceship Earth was released.
“Spaceship Earth” is a conceptual means to understand our planet, and how humanity must work together as a united “crew” to keep our vessel on course to ensure our survival.
This philosophy was put to the test in 1991 through the Biosphere 2 Experiment, where eight human volunteers would live for two years in a vivarium (a purpose-built, closed ecological system) based in Arizona. Funded by billionaire environmentalist Ed Bass, and under the watchful eye of John P. Allen, a systems ecologist, metallurgist and engineer, Biosphere 2 recruited eight subjects to test human resilience and ecological development to meet a range of dystopian scenarios – including an uninhabitable planet Earth which would necessitate the colonisation of space.
However, as all good reality TV producers know, any group of people in a manufactured environment (be it a villa in Spain, deserted island or state-of-the-art biosphere) will soon begin to turn on each other, casting an entropic shadow across the entire experiment/enterprise.
Will it be Lord of the Flies or Biodome? Join us on 24 April to find out!