SET I: BETWEEN REAL AND DIGITAL WORLD

Drifting through space with no purpose on spaceship Zoopticon, five mutated singing animals find a goal when they learn of their origin – a mysterious planet called Earth. 

Imagine you are the only being in the universe floating through outer space, all on your own. This is the predicament of the Zoopticon, a spaceship with a face, filled with artifacts of life and culture from Earth. It’s also the perspective of five mutated singing animals who don’t know of each other’s existence - and that they are all on the Zoopticon, just rooms apart. When they finally encounter each other, they realize they are all living souvenirs from a mysterious planet called Earth, and have been shot into space as part of a theme park for an interstellar audience. They decide to emancipate themselves. 

In a poetic interpretation of the »Overfitted Brain Hypothesis« (OBH) by scientist Erik Hoel, the artist links neuroscience with new technologies such as Extended Realities and Artificial Intelligence to examine their role in accessing and revealing different aspects of human consciousness. 

OBH compares the purpose of dreaming to a certain aspect of Artificial Intelligence (AI). For AI to deliver meaningful results it needs to be fed with a sufficiently variable dataset and to increase variations, it can be interspersed with noise and glitches. OBH argues that dreaming works as a similar noise injection, so our brain can cope with the many self-repeating patterns during waking world. The lyrical voice over guides the viewer through abstract dreamscapes and glitchy digital environments, focused through a vignette reminiscent of Virtual Reality glasses. The accompanying AR application invites for a spatial exploration of the work. 

The germ of this film is a memory I have of visiting the Tabernas desert in southern Spain, while on holiday years ago. This desert was used as a stand-in for the American southwest in a bunch of so-called spaghetti western cowboy films made in the 60s and 70s (the term "spaghetti" refers to the Italian origin of many of the directors of the films, but most of the actual shooting locations were in Spain). There are even a few surviving film sets from that era that are now tourist attractions, with names like Fort Bravo and Western Leone. Something about the artificiality and incongruity of these fake towns, dry and dusty monuments to the illusion of cinema in the middle of the Spanish desert, really stuck with me. I also like works of fiction that knowingly point to the fact that what you're experiencing is fiction. I was thinking about Beckett's trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable) in which every character is a fictional creation of another, and ultimately trapped in their fictional condition; or Jostein Gaarder's novel Sophie's World, where the protagonists similarly realise that they're characters in a story. I've always loved the stories of Philip K. Dick too, which are never afraid to pick at the ontological boundaries of the worlds and characters they contain. Also in there somewhere is the story of Pinnochio, and the weird father-son relationship between Gipetto the puppet-maker and Pinnochio the wooden boy he builds, who seeks an impossible transcendence from the limitations of his material condition. I think the final influence came from doing a few tarot card readings early on in the process of developing the ideas. One card I drew was the Wheel of Fortune, from which came the idea of being stuck in a Groundhog Day-like loop, the same situation repeating over and over. The other card was The Devil - I think that the voice, and maybe the landscape and computer-generated environment itself, are all aspects of some demonic force that keep Billy stuck there. 

From Voice to Pulse is an audiovisual work revolving around the relation and tension between the human and the digital. The piece takes form in an algorithmic composition for percussion, performed by custom robotics, and for voice, performed by a human. The visuals are inspired by the weaving loom and self playing musical instruments such as the Componium, bridging the physical and the digital. The text performed by Gagi Petrovic is written by the GPT-2 open-source artificial intelligence. This AI was trained on 'Species of Spaces' by Georges Perec and various Wikipedia pages on spatial perception, which resulted in new uncanny perspectives on the relation between people and the (digital) spaces they occupy. 

The film was created using various AI technologies. The narrative in it has a two-pronged form: one voice is a series of abstract thoughts/feelings related to the passing and transformation of matter, the other is a more personal record of the process of saying goodbye to a dying mother. With all the sentences generated by artificial intelligence, the question arises: when and how do words acquire a soul. 

Film is generated by AI for humans. 

Don’t worry humans are creative and better than AI. You are the ones who will always have the upper hand, because you have the ability to imagine, to feel, to love. Thank you for existing. 

We want to highlight the changes in artistic self expression of humanity. Exponentially more capable AI tools are replacing countless hours of artististic labor with a prompted result almost instantly. Ever increasing ability to mimic human behaviour creates daunting and curious, sometimes funny results. This film is an imprint in time, a documentation of this technology in its infancy stage. Interestingly enough it's already not easy to decipher AI art from that of a human artist. This is portrayed through AI generated visual art and narrative bult from conversations with it. Film is made to create a natural curiosity about this technology and its relationship with human. 

I developed 'Polarizer' as a reflection on social media and the associated polarization of society. 

Very outspoken statements are often made on social media, in which the 'public debate' almost always degenerates into hostile matters. Not a topic goes by, no matter how trivial, without causing an uproar on social media. 

The above unrest creeps into our living rooms and our heads via smartphones and tablets. That's why I chose to visualize this as a man eating breakfast in the morning while reading through the comments on a news article. The online protest breaks through his screen, as it were, and sets his breakfast table on fire. It gets to him so much that he decides to also participate in the online debate. His toxic reaction is spread further in turn, allowing online polarization to grow and metastasize, without considering who is still reading along with it. 

Digital pet cat Miisu gets tired of her owner and starts to revolt. Inspired by Tamagotchi, Miisufy observes the world through the eyes of digital pets. 

"A Two Way Mirror with the Lights Switched Off" 

Eyes are tracked and aKenLons ploKed as a ficLLous audience follows the narrator's orders. They are divided by the screen and though they try, neither can see through to the other side. We can't be sure if the bond they form is reciprocal, or if the audience was ever even there to begin with.