With devices providing access to augmented reality and virtual realities, what is “reality” in the digital age? Italian director Adele Tulli (normal) explores this question in her new documentary. realwhich had its world premiere on Monday at the 77th Locarno Film Festival in the Cinecity Deal Presents section, highlighting first and second features.
Produced by Pepito Produzioni in association with French company Les Films d’Ici and FilmAffair in association with RAI Cinema and Luce Cinecittà, the film is also debuting at a time when artificial intelligence and other technology topics are hotly debated. happening
“real It aims to explore the ongoing metamorphoses caused by our relationship with digital technologies,” highlights a description on the Locarno Festival website.
Tully took a similar mosaic approach. real His first feature as a doctor normalwhich “dissected the mechanisms of gender construction and integration in contemporary Italian society.” It debuted in the Panorama Dokumente program of the Berlin Film Festival in 2019. THRA review called it “extraordinary”.
In an email interview with THRthe filmmaker talks about what inspired his new Doctor Who, a clip of which you Can see here.The people she met along the way, at least digitally, and how she herself approaches life in a hyper-connected reality.
What motivated or inspired this film and why did you feel it was the right time to explore the impact of technology on us humans and the blurred lines between real, virtual and augmented reality?
I started thinking about some of the themes in the film years ago when I was living in London. I am amazed at the amount of CCTV cameras you see all over the city these days, wherever you are, wherever you go, not just in public places like tube stations but in every shop, school, pub, home, church. was Park – almost everywhere. One day I saw a man of South Asian origin carrying a mask with a suitcase in a narrow alley behind Trafalgar Square. He was standing under a CCTV camera, and I could only imagine how a surveillance gaze would process such a scene in an age of terror suspicions and racial discrimination. He actually dressed as the legendary Jedi Master Yoda, strode into a tourist-filled square, climbed onto a pedestal and stood for hours on a stick as the hero of the Skywalker saga, while passers-by smiled along with him. He kept taking pictures. The Instagrammable, reassuring image captured by dozens of tourists’ smartphones contrasts with one tracked by one of the world’s largest urban surveillance schemes. What do these contrasting images convey?
I started writing the film inspired by the masked figure that surrenders to the omnipresent, disembodied, mechanical gaze that surrounds us, which can offer contradictory interpretations of reality, and then the COVID pandemic happened. Since then, the digitization of our lives has taken on unimaginable proportions and our screens have become portals into digital landscapes where most of our interactions take place. I felt that what we called real was collapsing and I began to look for ways to represent that destruction.
Did the rise of AI happen while you were working on the film and did it change your plans in any way?
This is an interesting question because this is the first time I’ve worked on a project where the subject seems to be in a constant state of flux and evolves so rapidly that it can never be fully understood. . It was both annoying and exciting. I find that the tech world constantly presents a new set of trends that inspire discussion and generate headline-grabbing hype. We have it with crypto, NFTs, blockchain, the metaverse, virtual reality, and now artificial intelligence.
There is no doubt that some of these innovations are reshaping our world. The hard part is to feel the change while it’s happening, beyond the mere euphoria or panic that these tech hypes generate. I don’t think I changed my plans when a new emerging technology came up, but my plans were certainly loose enough to accommodate new situations and scenarios as much as possible. My aim with this film was never to provide definitive answers or explanations but to raise questions about the profound social changes of the digital age.
How did you go about finding the people, the characters we keep hearing from in the film and how difficult or easy was it to share your stories and perspective with them? And which characters did you spend the most time with?
Before I got into the actual film production, I worked on a long research phase during which I identified some key areas of interest that I wanted to focus on and began looking for people, stories that technology. can illuminate certain aspects of life under the control of and hyper-connected world.
Among the many people I’ve met throughout this process, one of the most revelatory and surprising experiences for me was getting close to a strange VR community of friends who spend most of their time together. Spend time on a platform called VRChat. He was eager to share his stories, especially about how he envisions the Metaverse as a digital space of limitless creative expression, where he can express his identity beyond borders, and beyond any physical barriers. can find Their avatars can be a manifestation of their perceived self, often feeling more of who they are than their physical bodies. For many of them, avatar embodiment had a huge impact on their story of self-discovery, and coming out as trans in VR influenced their IRL gender identity and expression. I’ve spent a lot of time with and developed close relationships with some of them, and I find it interesting that we’ve still never met in person, and I have no idea what they looked like in the physical world. are
We hear different perceptions of digital worlds and lives – some are positive, liberating experiences, while others are negative, debilitating, terrifying experiences. How much did you want to show that balance of ideas versus focusing on one point of view or takeaway? What would you like the audience to do?
I began this project with a desire to explore the ongoing emotional, social, and cognitive metamorphoses caused by our relationship with digital technologies, at a time when I realized that many fundamental features of the world as we knew that it no longer existed, as did the boundaries between physical and meta-experiences, between public and private spheres, between ideas of the real and the fake, as between the body and its impressions. I love the idea of using audiovisual language as a thinking tool, which allows for insightful and creative exploration of even broad and complex topics without the need to provide clear answers. Thus, I did not intend to describe either a technophobic perspective or only a positive one, of course. Because the subject is so multi-faceted, complex and constantly evolving, I intend to offer the audience a kaleidoscopic, immersive, thought-provoking visual journey exploring what it feels like to be human in the digital age. Trying to raise critical questions on some of it. Disturbing aspects and key challenges.
How do you yourself approach life in our hyper-connected reality?
Searching for an impossible and unattainable balance between screen time and offline, time in nature.
What can you tell us about the special technology and lens you used to take us viewers into these digital and virtual worlds?
Working on the visual language of the film was equally challenging and fun, because in an effort to create an immersive experience within the spectacle of our everyday digital lives, we creatively played with the same lenses that would normally be seen in new films. Used to access digital areas. The inspiring principle behind this was that almost everywhere there is human activity today, there is a web-connected device recording it. Therefore, the people depicted in the film are described as constantly interacting with the raw footage recorded by the devices around them, such as smartphones, laptops, “smart” electronic devices, surveillance cameras, VR headsets, dash cams: machines and virtual gazes that reveal a new way to experience reality. The characters we meet use a variety of common digital technologies, always equipped with some kind of digital eye, to record their surroundings in many different formats, resolutions, and styles to suit their purpose. These include: vertical smartphone gazes, or horizontal webcam field-of-views, infrared security cameras, virtual drones within a VR platform, satellite zenithal looks, 360° photospheres that capture every possible direction of view, robotic vacuums. Scanners produce point cloud images of an apartment.
In its attempt to imagine and recreate the way machines see us, the film ultimately transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar, the uncanny, the alien, and through its distorted lens, our contemporary media tour de force. Can recognize the created being.
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