#post western

In response to a question posed by leading futurist Sohail Inayatullah about other forms of the "Futures Iceberg" which could apply to the Global South, Banyan Futurisms was proposed by artist & futurist Kai (Kari) Altmann as an obvious response, with a focus on South Asia. 

The Futures Iceberg is a model for what Sohail calls Causal Layered Analysis--analyzing systems and their effects at deeper, wider and more interconnected levels through multiple lenses of knowing. 

A Banyan is a tree native to South Asia that grows in muscly rhizomes, dissolving the boundary between roots and branches, ground and sky, and even from tree to tree. It feels wild, strong, and like it contains an ancient, generative intelligence full of effortless connection. Its collective growth takes over scaffolding, buildings, sidewalks and streets. Multiple trees can merge together creating mega trees, and these zones are considered especially sacred. 

Banyan Futurisms are still being defined, and Kai purposefully leaves it open and slowly evolving to encourage those from the Global South and especially South Asia to join in their definition and evolution. 

It's easy to see them as an extension of interconnected, holistic and "wild" futurisms, and as a symbol for reclaiming space with an ecological edge.

XLE.LIFE’s editor Kai (Kari) Altmann is a fanatic for Indofuturism(s) and Desifuturism(s), so when she saw Prateek Arora’s AI-assisted concept images on Instagram she was instantly hooked.

She managed to grab Prateek for a meetup and eventually 5 Questions on the record back in 2023 in Mumbai. Here is the interview over a year later, on the occasion of the release of KALKI 2898 AD, India’s most ambitious Indofuturist movie so far, coming in the afterglow of Dune 2, Furiosa, Dev Patel’s Monkey Man and others. It’s been quite a year for cinema, for Desi cinema, and for Indofuturism/Desifuturism too...

I don’t have any thesis or argument, just sorta typing out loud. I suppose post-westerns are more about the end of an era along with themes of letting go of an idealized past to allow a gentler future to take hold. For the metaphorical gunslinger to either put down his revolver or let his corpse be added to the foundation that future is built on. Would that make Star Trek 6 a post-western? Would that make both Red Dead Redemption games post-westerns?