Alice Bucknell: Staring at the Sun

Videostill from Alice Bucknell, Staring at the Sun, 2024-2025, 40:00 min., two-channel 4K video, colour, sound. Courtesy of the artist

- selected by Inke Arns (HMKV) –

Staring at the Sun is a “sc-fi documentary" exploring the dark side of solar geoengineering: the deliberate, large-scale modification of the Earth’s climate systems by manipulating the influence of the sun. Set globally across the Louisiana Bayou to the Arctic Circle, Wyoming to Gstaad, and from the Great Barrier Reef of Australia to the palm oil plantations of Indonesia, this work examines geoengineering proposals that are currently undergoing research and development in both the US and Europe, as well as current evolutions in climate modeling and digital twin technology.

Narrated by multiple protagonists including NASA remote sensing scientists, geoengineering startup CEOs, dilettante documentarians, and a supercomputer called Derecho—all of which are based on real world interviews conducted by the artist—the film also explores how novel technologies continue to shape and redefine our relationship to the world that we call home. By embracing the parafictional and paradoxical nature of the “sci-fi documentary" format, the project examines the slippery border between the future fictive and the already real as humanity stands on the precipice of a new era of climate engineering.

Ultimately, the film considers what is at stake with solar geoengineering protocols, the evolution of Earth to planet to world, and the many blind spots of rendering the atmosphere as something mappable, modifiable, and wholly knowable.

 

Alice Bucknell is a North American artist, writer and educator based in Los Angeles.

Their work explores the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relationships, and forms of knowledge. Bucknell is generally interested in the limits of scientific knowledge and systems thinking, the weird possibilities of play, and the ecological dimensions of games that can dissolve binaries like humans vs environment, natural vs synthetic intelligence, and self vs world.

Bucknell’s work has been exhibited widely, including recent and upcoming exhibitions with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Copenhagen Contemporary, the Oslo Munch Triennial, HEK, EPFL Pavilions, MUDAC, and their first museum solo show at Kunsthalle Prague. Previous shows and collaborations include presentations with Serpentine, the Venice Biennale, Medialab Matadero, Frieze x Getty PST, and the LA Public Library.

In 2025 their video game The Alluvials was acquired by SFMOMA in San Francisco, making it the first video game to enter the museum’s permanent collection. In 2026, Bucknell will present new commissions at Biennale Gherdëina 10 in Val Gardena, Italy, and Counterpublic, a triennial in St. Louis, US, and will take part in the La Becque Principal Residency Programme. They are currently faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, where they teach courses on worlding, video games, and philosophies of technology.