Digital Energy Futures documentary launch
This film explores how people living in Australia see their future lives in a country where increasingly extreme weather, concerns about public health, growing levels of technological automation are creating uncertainty about demand for electricity in the future.
Imagine a future life where your smartphone, watch, airpods and your electric car were automatically charged without you even knowing. What would it be like to give up control to an external system which optimises your energy use, decides when a robotic vacuum cleans your home and even when your electricity is available. Or are these even realistic or desirable futures?
This film explores how people living in Australia see their future lives in a country where increasingly extreme weather, concerns about public health, growing levels of technological automation, and a society dependent on digital media are set to create uncertainty about demand for electricity in the future. The filmmakers follow the everyday lives of five households to ask how they are inventing their own ways to live with emerging technologies, imagining and planning for their own futures in ways that might complicate the ambitions of industry and policy makers.
Director — Sarah Pink
Sarah Pink is a design anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. She is Professor and Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University. Her work focuses on how we may live with emerging technologies in possible but as yet unknown and uncertain futures. Her films include Laundry Lives (2015) and Smart Homes for Seniors (2022). Her latest book is Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future (2022).
Filmmaker - Jeni Lee
Jeni has 15 years of experience collaborating with diverse community groups, organisations, activists, artists and academics to produce people-centred documentary films.
Her work bridges documentary filmmaking and communication for social change, exploring how communication processes and products can perform multiple roles as research, observation, education, inspiring behaviour change, evaluation and advocating for structural change.
Researcher - Kari Dahlgren
Dr. Kari Dahlgren is a Research Fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab. Kari is a social anthropologist and ethnographer interested in the social and ethical aspects of energy production and consumption in Australia.
Her work is situated at the intersection of economic and environmental anthropology, with a particular interest in the anthropology of energy, climate change, and transition. Her doctoral thesis in Anthropology, completed at the London School of Economics, draws on ethnographic fieldwork in two Australian coal mining towns, focusing on the livelihoods entangled with the industry.
Film screening:
Tuesday 25 October 2022, 5-8pm
Monash Caulfield campus
