Speculating the Carbon-Rift: Capitalistic Dystopias and the Ecological-Noir in Carbon.

The film runs for 25 minutes and is produced as an independent film released as a part of the "largeshort film" series on YouTube for popular viewing.[3] However, the film stands out amidst similar films of apocalyptic futures in its conceptualization of the human factor in climate change. (37) In a world where climate change discourse often precludes the central issue of capitalism, and instead veers around technological fixes and "green" solutions that seek not to radically disturb the status quo, films like I Carbon i offer art's resistance to what Ursula LeGuin calls the "inescapable power of capitalism", a resistance embodied in the "art of words" (115). The article also discusses the unsuitability of literary realism as a mode for the representation of climate change and the possibilities of speculative fiction as a narrative vehicle to convey the vagaries of a future thriving on present fossil capitalism.[1] Climate Change and the Anthropocene Climate change is often mapped against the Anthropocene era, whose beginning Crutzen locates in the latter part of the eighteenth century, coinciding with James Watt's invention of the steam engine and the beginning of industrialization. With unprecedented temperature extremes, melting polar caps, ocean acidification, the recurrence of devastating natural disasters, and steady multi-species extinction, the reality of climate change and environmental damage has become what Timothy Morton calls a "hyperobject" or things that are "so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity" (1). [Extracted from the article]