Continuing its commitment to publishing scripts by moving-image artists, Film Notes presents the complete script of Urth (2016), a film by Ben Rivers made in collaboration with writer Mark von Schlegell, coinciding with the publication of Urthworks (MACK, 2025).
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But the game is up! We must all die; nor leave survivor nor heir to the wide inheritance of earth.
We must all die!
The species of man must perish; his frame of exquisite workmanship; the wondrous mechanism of his senses; the noble proportion of his godlike limbs; his mind, the throned king of these; must perish. Will the earth still keep her place among the planets; will she still journey with unmarked regularity round the sun; will the seasons change, the trees adorn themselves with leaves, and flowers shed their fragrance, in solitude? Will the mountains remain unmoved, and streams still keep a downward course towards the vast abyss; will the tides rise and fall, will beast pasture, birds fly, and fishes swim, and the winds fan universal nature; when man, the lord, possessor, perceiver, and recorder of all these things, has passed away, as though he had never been?
O, what mockery is this!
Mary Shelley, The Last Man. 1826.
URTH
Day Zero.
CO-2 – 22,000 parts per million.
This is a log of the surviving URTH project. It arrives out of nowhere, by necessity not invention. This is the first thing I discovered upon taking command of system files, was that no log had ever been kept. My predecessors kept detailed records of day-to-day experiments and problems of individual biomes, but never of the Vivarium as a whole, what we might call the whole URTH. This continued when operations were taken over by our A.I.
Who had any idea URTH would be the most important experiment ever conceived? And that a graduate student summer worker would be the last scientist.
Fact: I have disengaged the majority of the A.I. functions at this moment. I’ve taken command of URTH.
Day One Hundred Forty Four.
Oxygen – 25.2 percent.
Once again, our rainforest breeds wrong. The mosaic pattern cannot be artificially established without constant turbulence.
Crew quarters, apparently intact, show signs of infestation. If I allow insects something else to live for they might leave my rainforest alone. I very much want a more seasonal flux in temperature than the current stabilization allows. Flux, where have you gone?
FACT: It was over exactly this that I decided to disengage the A.I. We had a disagreement over the importance of wind to a living system.
Day Two Hundred and Thirty-three.
Oxygen – 29.8 percent.
Outside URTH, the CO2 is all crowded around. Sensors suggest a Venus-style greenhouse transformation, on a scale no one quite anticipated. Is that why our skies have been blank for years? And all signals inert?
In that regard URTH Project has become, in a sense, Earth 2.
I am in some sense lucky, I'm happy isolated, contained, autonomous. The benefits of my singularity are showing - agriculture is now 7/8 wetlands.
Earth is lucky too, to have folded us here. Tree and bookworm. Every species going for broke as always. Everything trying to beat out its neighbour. Every fish chasing down its children.
Like the Sybyls, those women whose utterances kept the ancient world turning, I can be sure to wrap my words in mystery. Hence this record, these photographs, and this "I" will have at least two purposes simultaneously – to express and to make invisible what it records.
Fact: The environment does not promote, it demands stress at every level.
Day Three Hundred and Twenty-Two.
Oxygen 20 percent. A drop of near 10 percent.
The correction was extreme. But it's extremes we're looking for.
Fluctuations have been extreme even daily, ever since the system has been closed.
URTH still contains multitudes. Multitudes of waiting. My ants work soil, waiting. My bees fertilize and make honey, waiting. My coral reefs shelter, waiting. My trees make my air, waiting.
For what?
We can never submit. We can always work. As long as we wait.
For what?
This is no desert. This is no jungle. This is no ocean. Don't give it that credit. URTH is no Earth. But I love it nonetheless.
Mud. URTH. Nothing following.
Fact: Disappointment is the guardian deity of human existence.
Day Three Hundred and Forty-three.
CO-2 – 5,666 parts per million.
Wind will not come from outside. One can spark it, but the flame of it must catch. The Principle must exist. One ignited then from then on, wind makes decisions, or embodies the will of the system.
"Our gaseous physique makes possible for us many distinct modes of exquisite and intimate bodily contact and union. Consequently, we easily recognize that, though we are indeed distinct and different individuals, we are also one and identical."
I have been increasing ocean evaporation as much as 20 percent of late.
This is not to slight my Ocean. My Ocean is our Ark, upon which we float. We love our Ocean, still the healthiest of the living systems I manage. The Ocean promotes the luxury of all the rest and promises all beings here something like eternity still. I serve my Ocean. I must pinch the Ocean to wake her.
Fact: At least 50 percent of the energy of all wind dynamics on the old planet were due to Ocean evaporation.
The Ocean has always fanned the wind.
Day three hundred and fifty six.
CO 2 – 728,000 parts per million.
With oxygen as it is I haven't exercised in a week. This will only be for a time. WIND - Water Initiated Nudge-Draw - inter-biome communication will bring it back.
Usually energy begins in the fire of the sun, stolen by the receivers skinning URTH’s facade. That energy is dispersed shivered down cascading triangles of living systems. Then it eventually becomes CO2 and must be packed away. But what if along the way energy entered a state between states, a self-transforming boundaryism. Say the wind was evaporated before it was stolen, exploited by the living, not the dead lungs, not burned by cascading electricity - by the animals, the plants, the drinkers of condensation. Owned by the architecture and the bodies of the machines with in it. The so called dead machines.
Fact: Wind is a liquid.
Day Three Hundred Sixty-Four.
Oxygen still dangerous at 17 percent.
I have seen a breeze! It was in the desert savana at Night. I will not let the cameras take it away. I will not look.
Fact: I ate the arm of the cactus that showed it to me.
Day Three Hundred and Sixty Nine.
CO-2 – 12,000 parts per million.
I have artificially injected sulfate into all of the biomes.
Within the confines of URTH, breathing the gas of URTH, secreting its waters, there is no longer doubt of the possibility of wind. I know because I have seen it. I have recorded it and read it here. But wind is simply the dynamic expression of the inter-relation of the system's pieces.
The Mystery of the winds, for it is now a plural entity I call upon, a plurality. The life of the system depends on this spirit.
This is difficult for me to express. It is not just wind I demand. My second goal, as a human scientist, is the establishment of the possibility of a multiverse.
Anticipating my own death, I am working on my will and testament,
climbing closer to the node of freedom.
Fact: Upon my death, I have programmed A.I. to return. My remains must be scattered on the winds.
Day Three Hundred and Seventy-Two.
Oxygen – 18.1 percent.
Under my stewardship Urth has contained immensities. Each of these plants is participating, drinking in its sun.
But only inwards, away from history. Only backwards in time.
It's not just the oxygen.
Any species might explode. From outside it's a lot clearer what we are. It's for that reason I exit from time to time, fully suited, to repair cameras.
I give URTH a mirror from which we may behold our rational and beautiful girders -- our exoskeletal skin – as philosophical and complex as anything inside or outside.
Fact: I watch myself.
Day Three Hundred and Seventy-Four.
CO-2 – 9,100 parts per million
The sulfates took care of the Carbon buildup. But where is my Oxygen?
I only monitor, too tired to move now. Wind will come. But when?
I write my log.
It has been all sun almost constantly. As if we now occupy the equator, we are in a doldrums outside and in. I am not sure how that is possible in our latitude of Venus.
Satellites and aircraft have begun appear in our skies, I see them, but they are through the glass and never evident from our outside cameras.
Fact: The majority of deserts on the surface of the old biosphere 1 occurred in Trade Wind Latitudes
Day Three Hundred and Seventy-Five.
Oxygen – 19 percent. A rise!
I may live. The survival of a mammal species is too much to pin down to one bottleneck. I don't think it's fair.
Like Heraklitus understood, photosynthesis was always the way. This is why he ate grass at the end. I don't know why I'm still eating my comrades.
For mammals, and things with minds, sea-less earth proved a harsh stepmother. I will make myself Urth's own.
The Tigris Euphrates valley, where this adventure began, and whose end I in some sense embody. There is where I return. Like Eve, I come out of nowhere and return eventually to desert and forest.
Which came first, the egg or the Ostrich?
Fact: Lilith was the First.
Day Three Hundred and Seventy-Six. Hour Ten.
CO-2 – 15,000 parts per million
The enormity of landscape is for the most part imagined.
Those of us with decent eyesight only ever took it for granted that there was more of the same over the horizon.
How do we know we weren't in some tiny container, some holodeck all along?
What if you could see the entirety of the ocean as a single entity? And simultaneously - or a moment's later –glimpse its infinities?
Fact: Though Pluto's atmosphere is incredibly thin, and it's way too far from the sun to receive a day, there the skies are blue, and as bright as my own. There the sand, the particles of nitrogen, water ice, the methane - appear to be a world exactly like this one. Only gravity would be far different. Falling downwards, backwards along the curve, you yourself would become quite large. Earth's a heavy place. But sometimes i wonder if i am there. Or am I an artificial intelligence, programmed to believe I am? In that case objects are alive. We living things are the ghosts. The architects were correct; we are only our monuments.
Day Three Hundred and seventy-six. Zero Hour.
Oxygen –17.1 percent.
The great rite.
It was taught to us, the highest, most sacred form of magic there is. Because that moment. Those shining seconds are the highest power.
Being alone in one's one world like that. Free.
The little world.
The big world.
There is the world above and the world below.
Whoever thought one being could walk all the way?
I'm done. I'm going outside, where the world is still going on. Those airplanes, those lights are real. The world is still here. I can go to the Mall.
Fact: I see you, Observer. I always have.
END
