Oracle

Overview

Oracle is a meditation on the relationship between plants, humans, and technology. Filmed collaboratively by Ben Tong and Alice Wang at Biosphere2 in Oracle, Arizona — a self-contained ecosystem enclosed in a 3.14-acre glass and steel structure, the work defamiliarizes the synthetic structure and the organisms living within it. In the age of the Holocene, the space of Biosphere2 becomes an allegory for our entanglement with the world. Despite our technological interventions, we find that it is no longer the case that we can disregard the noumenal world. Forces and substances like CO2, bacteria, UV rays, the weather and viruses exert their own presence. What is at stake is another way of relating to our mediated environment, our place within it, and death.