Not for the answers that might be given, but for the questions that can be raised is this website established. Indeed, the question is the mother of the answer. KOYAANISQATSI’s task is to raise questions that only its audience might answer.

KOYAANISQATSI is the first part of the QATSI Trilogy. POWAQQATSI, the second film, was completed in 1988. NAQOYQATSI, as yet unfunded and in search of an angel/investor, will complete the Trilogy. As KOYAANISQATSI focuses on the north and POWAQQATSI on the south, NAQOYQATSI will project its gaze on the global world. With NAQOYQATSI’s completion, the QATSI Trilogy will stand as a cinematic utterance to an untellable event – the technological transformation of the planet.

Also, found on this site is the film ANIMA MUNDI. While out-of-sequence of the Trilogy, ANIMA MUNDI has a place in the Trilogy’s progression. All of us who participated in its making bonded in our commitment to realize NAQOYQATSI. What we learned here could be taken there. The Trilogy represents a process, a long span of reflection and production. ANIMA MUNDI’s subject and cinematic treatment expanded the QATSI effort. Created in 1991 with a gift from the Bulgari family of Rome, ANIMA MUNDI was offered as a media voice to the WWF in support of their biological diversity campaign.

As the general focus of the QATSI Trilogy is the technological milieu, it is the purpose of this site to foster a web-dialogue on this little understood, yet ubiquitous subject – the nature of technology. What we know about the subject is vastly promotive, over-the-top positive, coming to us from the producers of global technology. A glowing wonderland of unlimited opportunity is promised by the good life of the technological order. Infinite capacity, virtual immortality, super human cognition – attributes that have until now been reserved for the divine are indicated for technology. A new technological pantheon has been established in the horizonless world of the Blue Planet.

But is technology what it appears to be? Have we looked behind the shimmer of its glowing surface? Very little, if anything, reveals its meaning through mere appearances. Most everything is more complex, full with a universe of hidden dimensions. Is technology an exception to this common experience? Or, have we accepted its truth as the truth? Is technology a new and comprehensive environment, the host of life, that has replaced the natural order? Is technology the new universal religion? Can faiths unquestioned become our prisons? Should we place blind faith in the techno-clergy of the new order? Does the computer reproduce the world in its own image and likeness? Is technology a mere tool, as we are told, that can be used or misused depending on one’s intentions? Is technology neutral? Does it possess a life of its own? Is it the effect of technology on this or that (the environment, etc.), or is it that everything is situated in technology? Has technology become an addiction, an altered state that we cannot live without? Is technology a way of living? Do we use technology or do we live technology? Is it our consciousness that informs our behavior or is it our behavior that informs our consciousness? Do we now live in a world beyond the senses, in a micro-universe, where small is dangerous? Is technology synonymous with the machine or has it become ordinary daily living?

What better place to raise these and other questions that on/in the global Internet? This high-tech nervous system, this digital alchemy, this synthetic organism that is changing the world seems ideally suited for such a task. If entering the medium questioned to raise questions seems contradictory, this is because it is. To freely embrace this contradiction is the motivation for this site.

Like the oxygen we breathe, technology is the big force, omnipresent and inescapable. It appears as a force of nature. Who can question nature or acts of god? Something this prevailing, this present, is normally taken for granted. Only the heretic could dare to be so blasphemous.

Could it be that our language is no longer capable of describing the world in which we live? Perhaps, the world we see with old eyes and antique ideas is no longer present. Do we inhabit a technological universe the laws of which are unknown? The world we see is being left behind.

A new untellable world is unfolding. As the human race accelerates into the twenty-first century, we enter a virtual, digital environment, a world where far and near, past, present and future are simultaneous realities. The human center of gravity seems to be blasted into the void. Our bodies are less central to our lives, our physical involvement with an increasing synthetic world grows less. Have we arrived at an unthinkable post-natural and post-human condition? Does this singular event offer to all that will, the extraordinary opportunity to re-name the world in which we live? Are we, appearing to be human, already the cyborgs of the fiction of science?

These are the questions that motivated KOYAANISQATSI, the other films of the Trilogy and, hence, the website that we offer for your participation, inquiry and dialogue. This is our beginning effort to supposit these films into the web, to mainline the QATSI Trilogy.

In closing we offer two reflections that articulate the point of view of this site: one from Elias Canetti, a Nobel Laureate for literature; the other from French philosopher and writer Jacques Ellul.

A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality.

- Canetti

"...The crisis that we are approaching today is of yet another order. For it entails the transition, not from one form of society and power to another, but to a new environment...The present crisis...is a total crisis triggered by transition to a new and previously unknown environment, the technological environment....The present change of environment is much more fundamental than anything that the race has experienced for the last five thousand years."

- Ellul


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