Spar Clyde Genesis is a 21-minute audiovisual essay that investigates how graphic design and sonic methods can extend the traditions of the film essay to articulate social class and ecology as interconnected systems. The film situates class through a hybrid documentary-fiction format, drawing on myths and material histories of solar and economic interaction. Rather than treating class solely as a representational theme, the work frames it as a socio-ecological relation embedded in planetary, technological and economic processes.
The film addresses three research questions:
1. How can methods from audio essays and sonic fiction reconcile with the speculative capacities of the film essay?
2. How can audio-vision and graphic design approaches to sequencing enable class to be articulated as a socio-ecological relation?
3. What ethical questions arise when linking class and ecology through speculative audiovisual form?
The work develops Michel Chion’s concept of audio-vision, testing how sound reorganises the perception of image and vice versa. Interviews with theorists, documentary fragments, archival footage and original narration are combined with sound composition to create essayistic movement between documentary material, speculative rhetoric and cosmological abstraction. Graphic design approaches to sequencing, generative, modular structure and typography organise the film into sections that generate associative, ecological connections between images and ideas.
Compositional devices linkgraphic design and sound through:
– a typographically subtitled, percussive narrator
– drum rudiment patterns applied to sequenced image flow (→←→→←→←←)
– associative imagery
– audiovisual essays on design objects
These methods extend traditions of essay film (Alter, 2018) while drawing on sonic fiction and audio essay practices (Barton, Kronik & Goodman, 2024). In doing so, the film proposes that graphic design sequencing and sonic composition can operate as research methods for structuring audiovisual essays.
Through this essayistic sequencing, the film narrates historical events such as solar storms and moments where weather, economics and geopolitics intersect. By situating these events within a planetary ecological framework (Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life), the work challenges the ethical, political implications of a local, place-based notion of class by linking class to broader ecological systems.
Spar Clyde Genesis forms part of the wider Ecofantasy Kit research project and builds on generative approaches explored in Bad New Times. It is freely viewable online via Vimeo (see link below) and has been disseminated through screenings and research presentations at Central Saint Martins (2023), Glasgow School of Art and Bidston Observatory (2025), and informed subsequent curatorial research including The Near-Still Image screening (2026; RADAR ID 10709). It will be further disseminated through an exhibition at New Glasgow Society on 16th July 2026.
