GMU:Thinking In Tanks/Dominik Kämmer

Quiet Loud – The Power of Silence

Disclaimer: I’m not a scientist in this field. This is just a lose one sided interpretation of what I experienced and will differ from yours. I wanted the film to show things that you might be familiar with, arranged in the way I look at them, while still giving room to the viewer to see more or less of what I intended him to see. The “world“ is to complex for any mind to fully understand.

About the film
My goal with this film was to reduce man-made climate change and environemental destruction by shifting our mindset. I wanted to show that what we might call a state of “happyness“ is a matter of how we experience things in the first place and not what we experience (do, hear, see, feel etc.). Concentrating more on the how instead of the what could not only protect our environement and with that us as human beings, but also benefit our mental well-being.

The moment we get used to being surrounded by a this enormous multitude of impacts, we tend to lose sensation for experiencing beauty in the small things, at it's extreme beauty in just being. Personally I realized this in a interesting way when I first went out after two weeks of quarantine. Used to such a low level of sensory stimulation I could have spent the whole day at one place watching nature feeling fulfilled without getting bored by the bare and cold environement. It was not about everything being beautiful that day because of a “perfect sunset“ or other characteristics. It always can be “beautiful“ if we are capable of deeply experiencing it.



Link: https://youtu.be/dY42UflAVmc

---

Further explaination

Criticism on the way we live
The strive for growth in modern capitalism can be based on the idea that what we have now is never enough, but we would be happier by consuming more. When you look at commercials the message often is quite clear: Get this and you will be happier or even happy forever. Compared to other Organisms we have withdrawn from some of our “natural“ dependencies that were leading to struggle, pain and death back then. Over time we adapted to it so our higher expectations set us back to a state of mind where we have been in the first place. Continous growth was the only escape we thought, but at some point we adapted to it aswell leading to a more so exponential growth. But where do we go and what do we suffer just to satisfy our believe in thinking more would be better? Change is “natural“ but compared to what we are doing it is slow and a process of giving and taking, a circulation that evolves.

Man-made climate change and environemental destruction
A main price we have to pay is the change and destruction of what has been our source of fulfillment in the first place. Even though our physical body adapted to living in nature back then, we created a parallel system that replaces it step by step because we weren’t willing to take the beating for beating. My point is that I don’t think the benefit is worth it, considering the price that has to be payed. As we start to realize nature hitting back with climate change, we start realize that we can not exist out of this „system“, at least not in the long term.

Thank you for taking the time! Let’s exchange and listen to each other so we can all come to a more resilient understanding and act accordingly.