Have discovered a new photo app. One can do cute things with it or more disturbing things. It seems pretty limited one can only add one effect and one filter at a time, and some of the effects are really just filters.
Created the original image, the one l’ve messed with, on NYE. Yeah. Read: Trying on new lipstick and pouting into the iPhone. The first makeup I’ve bought in about 15 years if truth told.
If I’m blatantly honest at the back of my mind was the thought can I still pull it off before my lips get thin and puckered. I am not proud of this train of thought. I’ve reached that stage of life where whilst I’m all for positive images of older people though a little part of me screams ageing? Ok for you, but not me! Yes, really.
Am playing around with this app while sitting in a great heap of exhaustion. I could do to get to Brixton Wholefoods but somehow I don’t think that’s gonna happen today. Everyday last week woke with gritty eyes, foggy mind, somewhat bloated feeling and a kind of overwhelming weakness. I’ve got some stuff done, essentials and some writing and submissions.
Earlier I finished my book; The Parable of the Talents, the sequel to The Parable of the Sower. It was harrowing; I think I’m gonna have to take a break from near future dystopian fiction for a while coz instead of giving me the feeling things-aren’t-that-bad-yet. It’s tending to make me feel actually-things-aren’t-far-off-from-that. Both books are by Octavia E Butler, a black woman from California who has received the Hugo and Nebula awards for her work, both are an edge of your seat compelling read.
That said, these stories are also tending to make my think, as did Olamina, the narrator in the first book, that I need to repack my apocalypse bag. This is a real thing and resembles, and has been used as, camping equipment. They also make me too acutely aware of my lack of knowledge about the essentials of survival.
I mean how to you make soap or grow wheat? What plants can you eat? I know you can eat dandelion but that’s hardly going to keep us going when faced with raging famine and perhaps people who might not want to share or work collectively. And furthermore, tends to make me feel I need to enrol at a firing range and get in some shooting practice.
Yes, really, in my darker moments this crosses my mind. I was only joking about this last summer. About how come the apocalypse only the bad guys are gonna have the guns. And how I ought to know having watched every dystopian movie out there, naively wondering why they just can’t form a citizens assembly, then the penny dropped…Dark thoughts yes I know. Though the joke was funny at the time.
Anyway. I say all this at the risk of bringing you down on this fine winters day. At least it was fine earlier. That’s not my intention. It occurs to me these editing facilities of the Filto app could stand as a metaphor for possible destinies. We can make images nice or nasty. We can do the same for our future. Every day I feel it more and more its in our hands. It really is. Quite literally.
I just think we should all think very carefully about the future and what it holds, how we can shape it, what we are going to bequeath. How our action now, in activism or other ways; big and small, can make a difference between a hell or a heaven on earth or at least tend towards paradise, nostra primavera, Shangri-La, a new Eden with some almighty damage limitation and system change.
Of course, well on one level, I don’t really believe things here will get that bad as scenes depicted in Butler’s stories in my lifetime, at least not in the West. In other parts of the world, as Margaret Atwood work also suggests, elements of these stories certainly exist already. In an early edition of the Handmaids Tale Atwood notes, paraphrasing, ”All the practices cited in this book exist now somewhere in the world.” That was the bit that really sent chills through me when I read this as a young adult.
The scenarios described by Butler might well be experienced by our children and children’s children if we don’t act now. That is why I think it’s so hard to read about. These books, though fiction, give a very realistic picture of what the future might hold if we are unable to deal sufficiently with the climate emergency, with poverty and inequality. If we don’t have a just transition and system change we face at best a bleak future.
In these stories, published in the 1990’s, we see, against a backdrop of climate change, the rise of a fundamentalist quasi fascist Christian force who take power. The president, Jarret, aims ”to make America great again.” Thugs, associated with the regime but unacknowledged by them, round up and literally enslave the dispossessed; unemployed, homeless, squatters and groups with a different world view including Olamina’s Earthseed community.
We see what a deregulated and regressively legislated society and economy could look like with the return of debt bondage, legalised torture and sex trafficking. We see the violence that ensues when people are barely surviving, traumatised, desperate and distrusting. Sound familiar?
Just a last word on the app. There’s a three day free trial. After that its £34.99 for a year. It might be worth it for social, to glam up and play with party images but as an artists tool I’d say its pretty limited. There doesnt seem to be a function to make videos for more than 5 seconds. One can trim, cut and alter the speed but thats about it. Can’t seem to loop them either. Verdict: fun but an expensive toy.
A blog post by Anne Enith Cooper
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