This past August, we were asked to produce a book trailer and live stream a book launch for The Cyborg Anthology, written by Lindsay B-E, a poetry collection that takes place in a future where there was once a thriving world of Robots and Cyborgs living peacefully beside Humans, before a disaster destroyed all Robot and most Cyborg life. This project provided ample opportunity for creativity and experimentation within the editing process. Check out the trailer below:
The creative process began by first exploring The Cyborg Anthology’s key themes, specifically that this collection melds sci-fi and poetry, and human with machine. Our visuals consist of natural landscapes versus manufactured landscape, flesh body versus machine body, and bits of surviving information and code. These images are textured, decayed, altered, layered, and deconstructed using defragmentation and datamoshing techniques. The defragmentation and image pixelation undulates in sync with the audio, creating a fusion of the audio and video signals bursting in unison. The image coding and sound coding are fried to give the data a sense of corruption, as though we are receiving bits and pieces of distorted information.
These images never feel apocalyptic, rather, they give a sense of technology and nature growing together. We chose to not see humans in full, only glimpses of fingers, hands, hair, and eyes. But these are never fully formed, providing only glimmers and subliminal flashes of both cyborg and human body. We chose ambient music to accompany our juxtaposed visuals. We additionally incorporated an overlapping voiceover reading an excerpt pulled from the anthology, emphasizing its vast literary contributions and perspective. Our goal was to achieve a tonal quality that shifts between sounding human and mechanic.
Alongside this book trailer, we were asked to organize and livestream a video launch featuring poetry readings, prizes, and a live Q&A with the author. The stream was available on Facebook and YouTube, and the recording of the event can be viewed below:
The Cyborg Anthology takes place in a future where there was a thriving world of Robots and Cyborgs living peacefully beside Humans, but a disaster destroyed all Robot and most Cyborg life.
The book is organized like a typical anthology of literature, split into sections that include a biography of each poet and a sample of their poetry. It covers early Cyborg poetry, political, celebrity, and pop culture poets, and ends with the next generation of Cyborg poets.
The narrative takes place in the time after a cataclysmic event, and the collection wrestles with this loss. Through the lives of the poets, the book chronicles the history of personhood for technological beings, their struggle for liberation, and demonstrates different ways a person can be Cyborg. The poems and biographies together tell the story of a complex and enthralling world-to-come, exploring topics that are important in the future, and also urgent right now.
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