SpaceCraft Anafi

Once again I found myself on the island of Anafi, this time to research the temporary architecture of the beach for South magazine, and to be part of the Angelo Foundations' Eternal Internet Brotherhood.

My contribution to #ETINTERBRO was a beach screening of Piotr Kamlers' 1983 Chronopolis.

A reading of the island as an alien, deserted, and inexplicable landscape, an ancient ecosystem of machines and nature.

http://vt.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8un0oFbMg1rdsie4.mp4

The sea as a mechanism of energy, the concrete as a denial of existence, animals as alien visitors and plant life as the true citizen of the atemporal eternal civilization of Anafi. In Chronopolis, the sole occupation of the hiereatic inhabitants was to create time, solely for their pleasure.

There is not enough evidence against the existence of Chronopolis.

Despite the monotony of immortality, they lived in expectation, of the chance meeting of a particular moment in time and a human being.

The film is overlayed on the island of Anafi. Leaving behind it's southern typology, the overlay reaches deep into a mystical, uninhabited and perhaps ancient side of the rock long rumored to be, together with the rock of Gibraltar, the result of an alien invasion. The film searches the rock for signs of previous inhabitants, looking for fragments of a civilization they might have left behind.
(according to the opening credits, Chronopolis is a story of Eternity and Desire)

Scanning the landscape for clues, the meticulous elders of Chronopolis locate pieces of an infrastructural puzzle.

Could these be part of the intricate interface with which one navigated the island through time and space?

Are these giant circular plugs that we see, an advanced type of Superconductor cable connection, for unimaginable amounts of data transfer?

The research seems to suggest that ancient Anafians were a brotherhood of expert telecommunicators, using the nearby indigenous population of Santorini as their hardware, simple workers whose the island became Anafi's dock connector and potential launchpad.

It was a failed attempt to relaunch Anafi back to the stars that ruined the primitive and simplistic neighborhood settlements of Thira and Knossos. According to legend the ignition malfunctioned, spreading the energy sideways and creating a giant tsunami wave that engulfed the human settlements of the cyclades.

Meanwhile back to the overlayed present time, a large abandoned infrastuctural constellation is located on the center of the islands south facade.

A narrow, perfectly formed road leads into a central chamber, and ends in a large orthogonal data-port.

The small road ends abruptly there, clearly suggesting that this was the main, ceremonial teleport of the Anafian fleet.

The elders of Chronopolis are awed by this discovery, and decide to use their time machine to simulate a past visit to this ancient teleport, which could offer more clues as to the methods of t

The landscape around us fades and we are suddenly a few years back, or perhaps a few years forward. For the Elders, time is like sand on a beach, it does not necessarily move forward or backward, drifting instead eternally.

The moment in time to which we are transported, the main teleportation chamber is half filled with a soft green liquid, and we are greeted by 3 Cloud Oracles, swimming in the cooling agent of the still dormant teleport. Was the liquid not cold enough for the teleport to function? Was it too much? Had the island run out of energy, and could not power up?

Or was it in the middle of a charging process, and would soon be ready for take-off to another voyage through the stars?

On the way back to the beach, we encountered yet more pieces of this infrastructural puzzle, but still not enough to complete the picture. Everybody was sleeping calmly, deeply, even if it was the middle of the so-called day. Suddenly we wondered where all this sleepenergy was going, where was it stored? And why did humans spend so many hours charging up on energy, since they seemed to hardly move, hardly spending any of the energy they were collecting?



Were these visitors just part of an operating system of energy collection, that the island had devised to charge up its energy reserve? Did the island invite the humans to sleep enough hours for it to collect the energy it required? Was the current OS of the island a way for it to recuperate it's past operational status as a traveling spacecraft? And would it be taking off once the humans slept enough hours to power it up?

Chronopolis ends with a chance encounter between a human and a sphere.

Love at first site, this is the moment that the elders have been waiting for, something they could never orchestrate, but always prayed for in their monotonous immortality.

This was the reason they created time in the first place, this was the destination of spacecraft Travelstar Anafi.