NASA’s Voyager Fly-by Animations

A preliminary ambition of an eco-poetic approach to cinema is to establish that eco-criticism can give a radically new understanding of film and video. Part of the cultural work of experimental animation is to demand just such radically new readings. This chapter offers an eco-poetic/eco-critical reading of a group of films that appear to have no connection to environmentalism, and which are in every sense of the word experimental. In this sense the chapter is itself an experiment. As befits a philosophy of connection and interconnection, the eco-poetics of cinema has many genealogies. Among them, we should respect the genealogies of science and engineering that underpin the moving image in general and animation in particular, not least since it is in them that we first encounter the technique of experimentation.