KOYAANISQATSI, which means, in the Hopi language, "Life out of balance" was released in 1982. The second film, POWAQQATSI ("Life in Transformation"), was completed and released in 1988. NAQOYQATSI ("Civilized Violence"), to be released in the fall of 2002, will complete the trilogy. As KOYAANISQATSI focuses on the north and POWAQQATSI on the south, NAQOYQATSI will project its gaze on a globalized world. With NAQOYQATSI's completion, the QATSI Trilogy will stand as a cinematic utterance to an untellable event - the technological transformation of the planet.

NAQOYQATSI chronicles the most significant occurrence of the last five thousand years. More cataclysmic than the rise and fall of great empires, the clash of world religions, the drifting of continents, the film documents the transition from a natural environment to a "new" nature, a technological reality.

In this scenario, human beings do not use technology as a tool, but rather live technology; it has infused itself into every aspect of life. Technology is a force and like oxygen, a necessity that we cannot survive without.

It is in this sense that technology is naqoyqatsi, a sanctioned aggression against the force of life itself. The Hopi term "naqoy" means "war", "qatsi" means "life"; but this is not the war of the battlefield, it is the war of human experience; of ordinary daily living; the price we pay for the pursuit of our technological happiness, the good life. In NAQOYQATSI, the image itself is the film's location, the corporeal has been displaced by the virtual, a victim of the war between old nature and the new nature. NAQOYQATSI is an archeological excavation of the artifacts of this altered world.

The passages that follow represent some of the ideas and questions that motivated The QATSI Trilogy, and now this project as well.

To formulate a theory about a future society both very modern and not dominated by industry, it will be necessary to recognize natural scales and limits. We must come to admit that only within limits can machines take the place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom. Only within limits can education fit people into a man-made environment: beyond these limits lies the universal schoolhouse, hospital ward, or prison. Only within limits ought politics to be concerned with the distribution of maximum industrial outputs, rather than with equal inputs of either energy or information. Once these limits are recognized, it becomes possible to articulate the triadic relationship between persons, tools, and a new collectivity. Such a society, in which modern technologies serve politically interrelated individuals rather than managers, I will call "convivial." -Ivan Illich's Tools for Conviviality

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. -Guy Debord Society of the Spectacle

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? -Godfrey Reggio, www.koyaanisqatsi.org

NAQOYQATSI does not insist on a particular political standpoint or judgment on technology. Rather, it presents a series of thought-provoking images for the viewer to understand according to his or her own interpretation. The following statement, which Godfrey Reggio made regarding KOYAANISQATSI can be applied to the entire series:

KOYAANISQATSI is not so much about something, nor does it have a specific meaning or value. KOYAANISQATSI is, after all, an animated object, an object in moving time, the meaning of which is up to the viewer. Art has no intrinsic meaning. This is its power, its mystery, and hence, its attraction.... The film's role is to provoke, to raise questions that only the audience can answer. This is the highest value of any work of art, not predetermined meaning, but meaning gleaned from the experience of the encounter. The encounter is my interest, not the meaning. If meaning is the point, then propaganda and advertising is the form. So in the sense of art, the meaning of KOYAANISQATSI is whatever you wish to make of it.

This characterizes the perspective from which we invite you to participate.