Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard
Axel Stockburger
Red Stars
Documentaire | 4k | couleur | 68:46 | Autriche, Russie | 2018
RED STARS (English) The essay film RED STARS focuses on Alexander Bogdanov’s science fiction novel „„Krasnaja Svesda” (Red Star)” from 1908, which envisions a utopian technologically advanced communist society on the planet Mars. The book was written in the aftermath of the Russian revolution of 1905, at a time when Bogdanov still held a central position in the Bolshevik movement and was a close confidant of Lenin and Gorky. There even exist rumors that draw connections between the title of the novel and the later adoption of the red star as the central symbol of the Russian soviet party. Apart from his literary work, Bogdanov was a natural scientist who, with his conception of tektology, contributed greatly to the epistemological development of soviet science and he devoted his interests to the research of blood transfusion. For the American theorist McKenzie Wark, Bogdanov is an important theoretical predecessor for the conceptualization of the relationships between ecological systems and political organization. He writes, “the Martians of Red Star already possess a global knowledge concord, frictionless data gathering, and computational power that Earthly climate science would finally acquire by the late twentieth century. With that infrastructure in place, the Martians found then what humans have found only now—that collective labor transforms nature at the level of the totality”. Bogdanovs utopian vision has had a strong impact on the soviet universe of science fiction. The film investigates core topics of Bogdanov’s pre-revolutionary socialist Utopia, such as issues related to collectivity, the role of language, gender relations, art, economy as well as education through a series of interviews with the anarchist and great grandson of Bogdanov, Alexander Malinofski, the feminist philosopher Alla Mitrafanova, the poet and linguist Pavel Arseynev, the Cosmism specialists Anastasia Gacheva and Anna Gorskaya, as well as the science fiction theorist Boris Klushnikov. The film also engages with the genre of science fiction as a central platform for the critical discussion of political and social subjects.
Axel Stockburger employs global popular culture, such as computer games, and blockbuster films as a starting point for the production of his videos and text works. His work engages with novel forms of participatory and fan culture that have emerged with the transition from traditional mass media like TV and Film towards the Internet. In his videos he focuses on concepts such as intellectual property, political issues in relation to the notion of the information economy as well as the changing role of audiences.