SUNRIDER explores the lives of a group of earth’s survivors, living regenerative lifeways on terraformed asteroid earthships. A refugee AI program forms the godlike embodied consciousness of each earthship.
On this particular earthship, their name is AURORA. A group of humans, called Sunriders, pilot the earthships by connecting with the AI, while others tend to the complex, interlocking, closed loop ecosystems patchworked arklike over the terrain.
Shot on 35mm on the ARRIFLEX BL4 2Perf camera.
Part of the Planet Femme World.
Shot on 35mm on the ARRIFLEX BL4 2Perf camera.
Part of the Planet Femme World.
SUNRIDER explores the lives of a group of earth’s survivors, living regenerative lifeways on terraformed asteroid earthships. A refugee AI program forms the godlike embodied consciousness of each earthship.
On this particular earthship, their name is AURORA. A group of humans, called Sunriders, pilot the earthships by connecting with the AI, while others tend to the complex, interlocking, closed loop ecosystems patchworked arklike over the terrain.
Shot on 35mm on the ARRIFLEX BL4 2Perf camera.
Part of the Planet Femme World.
Shot on 35mm on the ARRIFLEX BL4 2Perf camera.
Part of the Planet Femme World.
"...and so the pilots, called Sunriders, became a conduit between Aurora’s artificial intelligence and their people; those who lived on and tended to the terraformed asteroid earthship, one of six, then five, of their kind. Though in truth the Sunriders were more than mere pilots or messengers in Aurora’s eyes: they were at once their children, parents, doulas, siblings, and lovers..."
—Allen Sagewell, An Account of Aurora and Their People, 2369
SUNRIDER offers a window into “Planet Femme,” my multi-modal speculative fiction world, which currently spans performance, film, video, prose, photography, and cartography.
In Planet Femme, liberated AIs run a system of terraformed asteroid earthships (asteroids that have been transformed to support human and earth life), where humanity’s survivors live in a world of femme futurity and empathetic technology. With the earthship Aurora as its center, I imagine a world in which humans live a regenerative lifeway atop a series of asteroids in deep space, reclaiming many historical practices of food and material cultivation and distribution. It is my hope that Planet Femme can serve as a vehicle for us to reimagine our path to a life-connected future here on earth.
SUNRIDER offers a window into “Planet Femme,” my multi-modal speculative fiction world, which currently spans performance, film, video, prose, photography, and cartography.
In Planet Femme, liberated AIs run a system of terraformed asteroid earthships (asteroids that have been transformed to support human and earth life), where humanity’s survivors live in a world of femme futurity and empathetic technology. With the earthship Aurora as its center, I imagine a world in which humans live a regenerative lifeway atop a series of asteroids in deep space, reclaiming many historical practices of food and material cultivation and distribution. It is my hope that Planet Femme can serve as a vehicle for us to reimagine our path to a life-connected future here on earth.
I wanted to imagine a future in which I, and my comrades, could thrive while being neurodivergent, queer, dis/abled, people of color, historically under-resourced, and so on. I also wanted to imagine a future in which the overculture’s relationship to our planet is no longer one of resource domination and extraction, but rather one of interconnection and ecological regeneration. To me, these two concepts—to exist in our fullness, and to approach nature and future with a giving hand—are inseparable. I am also interested in the decolonization and liberation of modern technology, which so often is created to serve the capitalist machine that will be our undoing. In this future, nature and technology fuse, and humans are able to enter into an empathetic, symbiotic relationship with the machines and AIs that we have borne.
SUNRIDER premiered at Les Femmes Underground International Film Festival in Phoenix, AZ in September 2018, and was featured at a MONO NO AWARE screening at Anthology Film Archives in New York in April 2018. SUNRIDER was also officially selected for Lift'Off's First-Time Filmmaker Sessions, September 2019. SUNRIDER was also part of the screening program for "SUPERHOST" at Like a Little Disaster in Polignano a Mare, Italy, from August 4th - October 15th, 2019. SUNRIDER was also officially selected for The Bush Films' Queer Sci-Fi & Fantasy Short Films screening on August 25th, 2020.
Jax Jackson and Feathers Wise as AURORA. Costumes by Cilium.