What I tried to show is that the main event today is not seen by those
of us that live in it. We see the surface: of the newspapers, the obviousness
of conflict, of social injustice, of the market, welling up of culture.
But to me the greatest event or the most important event of perhaps our
entire history has
fundamentally gone unnoticed. And the event is
the transiting from old nature or the natural environment as our host of
life for human habitation into a technological milieu, into mass
technology as the environment of life.
So, these films have never been about the effect of technology, of
industry, on people. It's been that everyone — politics, education,
the financial structure, the nation-state structure, language, culture,
religion, all of that — exists within the host of technology. So,
it's not the effect of — it is that everthing exists
within. It's not that we use technology — we live
technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe,
so we are no longer conscious of its presence.
-- Godfrey Reggio in "Essence of Life" short film about the
making of the movie Koyaanisqatsi (1983), which he directed.