Last April, we went out on bicycles and followed the blossoms. From street to street we crisscrossed, trailing the path of their colors.

As foxes, wolves, and deer took to the cities, parts of a world in lockdown gave in to a silent dream.

The skies were empty. Emails skirted across the planet like tiny comets of kindness. Skype rituals and Zoom exchanges took place against the backdrop of private rooms: a world, at once more intimate and more distant, made itself available as live TV, replacing the physical meeting, supplanting social life with an audiovisual simulacrum.

We had a brief window of time to take notice of the recent past, in which our senses had seemed to have become paralyzed by cascading urgencies. How could we respond to the imperative of being in the now, of inhabiting the present? Can a work absorb the moment in time of its making without becoming like the news?

Inhabitant is about this question and how it has informed our work in filmmaking, art, and design. Referring to processes of sensing and inhabiting as practiced by non-human-species such as mushrooms and lichens, we will reference the work of Anna Tsing and Jennifer Gabrys, among others. In doing so, Inhabitant will explore affinities between sensing and cinematic capture.

The work of Metahaven consists of filmmaking, writing, and design. Films by Metahaven include The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda) (2015), Information Skies (2016, nominated for the 2017 European Film Awards), Hometown (2018), Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) (2018), and Chaos Theory (2020, forthcoming). Recent publications include PSYOP: An Anthology (Koenig Books, London, 2018), and Digital Tarkovsky (Strelka Press, Moscow, 2018). In the long essay Digital Tarkovsky, Metahaven identify online experience as a slow, cinematic proceeding, projecting the textures and motifs of Andrei Tarkovsky as a deeper artifice of digital aesthetics and filmmaking.

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