Creation Fictions: Novum100

 

Instead of the god-like gaze of a maker looking down upon their creation,  Novum100[1] imagines different ways of conceiving how a vessel comes into being by placing film equipment inside the vessel during the hand-building process and filming upwards.

 

Novum100 is a 7-minute mesmeric trip that transports us through multiple realms of creation fictions during the vessel’s making.  The critter-like hands that appear in the film, suggest more sympoietic[2] processes of becoming.  

 

[1] Sympoieses: “a simple word; it means ‘making-with.’ Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing … Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company.”  Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016

 

[2] Darko Suvin introduced the idea of a “Novum” as a device or “strange newness” that compels us to imagine a different way of conceiving our world,  in his essay: Estrangement and Cognition, 1979.