CURA.

In its straightforward simplicity, the film leaves viewers wondering who this crew might be. Are they sole survivors of some apocalypse, salvaging wreckage from street level below the water’s surface? Are they scientists collecting specimens from the ruins of some waterlogged urban civilization? More likely, these are essential workers, employees of some civic or governmental entity who are going about the mundane tasks assigned to them. They’re just working their day job. In this light, Adaptation depicts an everyday world where life persists in the wake of the traumatic shifts caused by global climate change. Despite their situation and the unfamiliar world, they must deal with, there’s a kind of hopefulness within their normalcy. These people have clearly adapted.
Adaptation happens when human behaviors and routines are forced to change in response to upheaval. Adaptation is reaction and resilience. It is survival. Adaptation is exactly what people across the globe have had to figure out in the wake of the COVID-19 health crisis. It’s an all-too familiar reality and, even though Kline’s film was started well before the pandemic, Adaptation is incredibly poignant in our current moment. During the pandemic, there have been many instances of a communal, humanistic determination bringing people together so that society can keep going. And this is depicted in Adaptation through unglamorous maintenance work; we see the people who calmly clean up the mess after the crisis. In present-day life (as in the film), the civic body keeps moving through the efforts of sanitation workers, grocery store clerks, warehouse workers, truck drivers, agricultural workers, food service workers, and of course, medical staff. They are necessary. They keep order. Their quotidian jobs take on heroic significance.
Kline has stated that “Adaptation is both a film about the future and about the present that leads there,” and certainly it’s difficult to imagine one without the other. The work is part of Climate Change (2019-ongoing), the fourth chapter of the artist’s ongoing series of multi-media installations that similarly examine the complexity of life in the present times while anticipating the ominous future it shapes. The series began in 2014 with the project Freedom (2015-2016), which was inspired by the transition of power from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, the economic downturn, and viral political movements such as Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter. This project was quickly followed by Unemployment (2016)—a vision of a future labor force made redundant due to technological advances in automation and artificial intelligence engineering—and Civil War (2017), which pictures an authoritarian state emerging from class inequality, divisions in labor, and the disintegration of democracy. Each of these bodies of work is concerned with the still-unfolding political, economic, technological, and biological changes that will shape life in the 21st century, on both collective and personal scales.
To depict a humanity that has been commodified and instrumentalized by neoliberal policies, Kline turned to celluloid film rather than video, which he had long utilized for its hyper-realistic CGI possibilities, commercial feel, and HD slickness. But the artist associated these aspects of digital video with the past decade and instead wanted his new work to be detached from any time or era. He explains:
“In 2017, I started shooting on film again—actual celluloid—for the first time since I was in film school in the late 1990s. In college I rejected film, which felt unaffordable and archaic. Video, which has always been more immediate and affordable, felt full of radical potential, especially with all its in-built affinities with digital technology. After more than a decade producing video art as part of my practice, I returned to film, looking for a new vocabulary inside the moving image in the 21st century. I didn’t want to make images that felt like they were from 2012 anymore—images that felt like they were trapped in some kind of post-internet cage. Film as a medium, because of its long use in cinema—and in sci-fi movies—has a timeless quality, a freedom from a specific time and place. It’s also a medium that carries a lot of nostalgia. In Adaptation the characters on screen look out on a devastated future New York. As the transformed city passes them by, there’s a longing that you can see on their faces—a longing for a lost world in their past. Watching this, I want viewers—as they think about their own futures—to feel a kind of nostalgia in advance for the world we live in now.”

As he describes, “I’ve been especially inspired by films like Blade Runner (1982) and Alien (1979) which utilize earlier, more hand-made special effects—practical scale-models, miniatures, and blue screens. This method of working is grounded in the fabrication of physical objects and has a tangible connection to sculpture—but is also free of the many associations that contemporary tools of digital image manipulation are burdened with, especially their relationship to post-truth technologies and disinformation.”
As in the movie Alien, Kline’s everyday heroes are dressed in quasi-militaristic outfits: khaki sleeveless tees, army-green fleet jackets, and heavy black boots; along with the washed-out hues of the flood water and orange-ish daylight, the film’s color palette adds to a distinctly late ’70s feel. It should be noted that the leading actors from this golden era of sci-fi were predominantly white and that Kline makes a conscious and pointed break from (perhaps even a corrective to) this through his diverse cast. Additionally, the extreme verticality of the city around Adaptation’s characters brings to mind the hazy cityscapes in Blade Runner (minus the uber-futuristic neon). Coupled with the sculptural scale models employed in special effects, Kline’s vision of the future simultaneously looks forward and back.
That the film’s hand-made quality should speak to a simpler era of image-making is undoubtedly a byproduct of Kline’s ethics as an artist; the work is freed from hyper-stylized, tech-heavy cynicism of post-truth disinformation that plagues so much media today and, all too often, art. It slows down and lingers in a quiet promise that it might not be too late to imagine a better future for all. As Kline reiterates, “scientists tell us the world has only a short window to act in order to prevent true catastrophe.”