I found both ends of this week’s film festival to be tremendously bleak in the portrayal of the future and spent much of the week trying to find more positive exemplars of the future of humans and the portrayal of “virtual” spaces. Sian tweeted earlier this week there perhaps this was because actually “we revel in Dystopia as we fear it” and this is something that I find difficult to disagree with but also something tough to accept since we seemingly revel in a Utopian idea in our fables and pop culture – happy endings persist in the past and present but only unhappy endings await us in the future? Perhaps this is part of the ongoing discomfort people feel around the knowledge of certain but unknowable death? However I would like to think there are happier stories to tell about the future and about Digital Culture.
I was surprised at the negative backlash to World Builder in the Twittorials as I did not find it particularly sinister at all. This is either because I have read/watched and listened to too many science fiction stories around comas, virtual reality and the inescapable nature of past experiences which have already occurred that I saw what I thought to be a familiar story. If I’m honest I also saw it as a showcase for animation on a budget, and an excellent visual showcase at that. I didn’t think it was particularly brilliantly scripted/storied but the visual elements were impressive and the story coherent enough. To see the strong backlash about voyeurism was interesting as I think I usually have quite a pessimistic view of the quality and motive of ambiguous male characters in fiction but, in this case, I did not see the sinister element past the first few minutes. Although there was an initial sense that the builder was creating a trap for the girl, it became apparent, to me, that he was, in fact, building a simulation to allow a memory to take place.
The reaction to AI also intrigued me. Having seen the film at the cinema on release (when I was impressed by the visual effects, pleased with the acting, but deeply angered by the emotional pornography of the closing scenes given the release date’s proximity to the collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre) I found the idea of David, the emotional child robot who does not know he isn’t a boy, both compelling and unlikely. It is a futuristic parable on the dangers of meddling with technology and quite explicitly takes inspiration from both the Pinocchio and the Wizard of Oz. I do however find it a less interesting concept when the robot is an emotionally engaging young boy who stars at the camera with enormous innocent eyes, than in Bladerunner where Deckard is far less emotionally compelling leaving much more space for personal interpretation (depending on which cut of the film you are watching of course!).
I was going to look at remixing Elephants Dream when I heard that it was an open source movie – an admirable thing indeed – but found myself unable to as, quite apart from having limited time to do it justice, I just found the mismatch between the impressively realized animation and the dreadful voice track – with it’s strained and unrealistic accents and voices – too painful to rewatch the number of times it would have taken to do a proper remix.
Otherwise I think my comments on this week’s films are best summarised by my texts through the week. It was a fun experiment to view and tweet. I think if a more synchronous version (limited to a day or evening) had taken place it might have been even better but I did enjoy the back and forth when I was online at the same time as others.
