Moon Service: Living the Urrasti Dream in Anarres

The film “Moon Service: Living the Urrasti’s Dream in Anarres” is set in the two societies in Ursula Le Guin’s fiction, The Dispossessed. Synthesising the rapid development of the Ansible instantaneous communication technology in the planet Urras, with Urrasti’s dream of living free from drudgery manual labor, Urras is sending semi-autonomous server farms to its moon, Anarres. The server farm, consisting of two underwater pods, will save huge energy costs in cooling servers. The living pod and the working pod, equipped with solar panels, oxygen pack and controller of temperature, humidity and light, are designed to sustain, and be operated by, one person.


Although the only Anarresti operator supports Urrasti’s enjoyment, Anarresti themselves do not live, or work, for comfortness. Instead, the Anarresti envision themselves as cells of an organic society that work is their duty supporting each other’s lives, and situating themselves in an anti-hierarchical community. Problematically, the remote work of the server farm does not contribute to the living on Anarres, and the autonomous pods also isolate labor from their community. The film explores Anarresti's adaptive reuse of the pods in reacting to the collapse of the meaning of work brought by the server farms. To guard the operator’s underwater life, Anarresti transposes one of the living pods to a supply stand on the coast, providing backup oxygen packs, power and food. The parted pod no longer only serves as the medium of extraction for far-away Urras, but also reconstructs a familiar, yet micro, network where people feel needed and accompanied.