Towards Lefebvrian Socio-Nature? A Film about Rhythm, Nature and Science

ABSTRACT

The first thing you will notice about this article is that it is actually a film. We did not set out to make a film, it just ended up that way. We started out making music out of environmental data, wondering why we only ever look at scientific data, why we do not listen to it. Wandering around the city passing through the transformed landscapes of channelised rivers and broken industrial spaces, we wanted to reveal the socio-natural rhythms of this hybrid city. The text you see below represents the shooting script for a film that explores Lefebvre's notion of rhythmanalysis in the context of socio-natural rhythms. The video accompanying it is far more interesting, including the environmental music that we produced by feeding scientific data through samplers and drum machines. The video questions the nature of scientific representation and whether the notion of rhythmanalysis can be stretched to explore rhythms beyond the human. Furthermore, the process of actually making the video, submitting it to this journal, and responding to the referees' comments made us question the very nature of what constitutes an academic paper in the twenty-first century. The accompanying commentary is our attempt to deal with these issues.

To link to the film please go to http://www.blackwell-compass.com/home_video#gecofilm.