013 Ruba Al-Sweel - FIRST PHONE
mp4
What is it like to experience living through
climate change and geopolitical unrest from the specific vantage point of the
screen? Of platform capitalism and algorithms? As NPCs during epoch-making
events, how do we make sense out of the apophenic experience of scrolling?
Tragedy is indifferent to geography. This video-essay employs a visual and
textual language that responds to the current threat of extinction. This type
of compact metalanguage emerges as a by-product of new technologies such as
deep learning and neural nets. Narrated by a disarticulate AI egregore, FIRST
PHONE plays like a more-than-human stream of consciousness, laying in sharp
relief a reality that decenters humans in its imaginary. Text operates as
image, metaphor as truth, and rhetoric as more than mere adornment. The video
draws parallels between the indifferent machine and Red Sea hostilities of
political and ecological nature, coming to grips with a world plunged deep in
an era of chaos.
Written and directed by Ruba Al-Sweel; editor Dominique Barbouth @fotolog.wtf
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