Adele Tulli on the digital age, Yoda

As more and more devices provide access to augmented reality and virtual reality, what is “reality” in the digital age? Italian director Adele Tulli (Ordinary) is exploring the issue in her new documentary realThe film had its world premiere on Monday in the Cineasti del Presente section of the 77th Locarno Film Festival, where the first and second feature films took center stage.

The film, produced by Pepito Produzioni and FilmAffair as well as RAI Cinema and Luce Cinecittà in collaboration with French company Les Films d’Ici, also debuts at a time when artificial intelligence and other technological topics are hotly discussed.

“real It aims to delve into the ongoing transformation of our relationship with digital technology.

Tully took a similar mosaic approach real About her first feature document Ordinaryanalyzing “the mechanism of gender construction and assimilation in contemporary Italian society.” It debuted in 2019 at the Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama Dokumente program. THRof reviews called it “extraordinary”.

in an email interview THRthe filmmaker talks about the inspiration for her new doc, a clip of which you can watch here , the people she met along the way (at least digitally), and how she herself navigates the hyperconnected Treat life realistically.

What triggered or inspired this film?

A few years ago, when I was living in London, I started thinking about some of the themes dealt with in the film. At the time I was interested in having CCTV cameras all over the city, wherever you were, wherever you went, not just in public places like metro stations, but in every shop, school, pub, home, church, park – pretty much everywhere Not here. One day I was walking on a narrow street behind Trafalgar Square when I saw a South Asian man carrying a suitcase and taking out a mask. He stood under a CCTV camera, and I just imagined how the surveillance gaze would have dealt with such a scene in an age of suspicion of terrorism and racial discrimination. He actually dressed up as legendary Jedi Master Yoda, stormed to a square packed with tourists, sat on a pedestal and stayed there for hours, suspended on a stick like the hero from the Skywalker saga, while Passers-by smiled and took photos with him. This reassuring Instagram image captured on the smartphones of dozens of tourists contradicts images tracked by one of the world’s largest urban surveillance programs. What do these contrasting images say?

I started writing the film inspired by this masked figure succumbing to the omnipresent, disembodied, mechanical gaze that surrounds us, which can offer contrary interpretations of reality, and then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. Since then, our lives have become digitized to an unimaginable degree, and our screens have become portals to the digital landscape in which most of our interactions occur. I felt like what we used to call reality was crumbling, and I started looking for ways to represent that collapse.

Did the rise of artificial intelligence happen while you were making this film?

This is an interesting question because this is the first time I’ve been involved in a project where the subject matter seems to be in a constant state of flux and evolves so quickly that it can never be fully grasped. It’s both disorienting and exciting. I realize that a range of new trends are constantly emerging in the tech world, stimulating debate and creating compelling hype. We have experienced cryptocurrencies, 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 understanding the significance of change when it happens, beyond the euphoria or panic generated by the hype of these technologies. I don’t think I’ve changed my plans when emerging technologies emerged, but my plans are certainly loose enough to be open to new situations and scenarios as much as possible. My intention with this film was never to provide clear answers or explanations, but to raise questions about the profound social changes of the digital age.

How do you find the people and characters we keep hearing about in the film? Which character did you spend the most time with?

Before jumping into the actual filmmaking, I went through a lengthy research phase, during which I figured out some of the main areas of interest I planned to focus on and began looking for characters and stories that could shed light on certain aspects of life dominated by technology. .

Of the many people I met along the way, one of the most enlightening and shocking experiences for me was getting very close to a queer VR community of friends who spent most of their time On a platform called VRChat. They were passionate about sharing their stories, especially about how they imagined the virtual universe as a digital space of limitless creative expression, where they could explore their identities beyond borders and beyond any physical barriers. Their avatar can become a manifestation of their perceived self, often feeling closer to themselves than their physical body. For many of them, avatar embodiment has had a huge impact on their stories of self-discovery, and their emergence as trans people in VR has impacted their real-life gender identity and expression. I spent a lot of time with some of them and developed close relationships, and I found it interesting that we still had never met and I had no idea what they were like in the real world.

We hear different perspectives on the digital world and life—some are positive, liberating experiences, while others are negative, vulnerable, and scary experiences. How much do you want to show this balance of ideas, rather than focusing on one point or point? What do you hope your audience will walk away with?

I started this project to delve into the ongoing emotional, social and cognitive shifts in our relationship with digital technology, at a time when I felt that many fundamental qualities of the world as we knew it, such as physical experience, were no longer present and meta-experience, between the public and private spheres, between true and false ideas, between the body and its simulations. I like the idea of ​​using audiovisual language as a thinking tool that allows for insightful and creative exploration of a wide range of complex topics without having to provide definitive answers. Therefore, it is not my intention to present a technophobic perspective or a simply positive, unquestionable perspective. As the subject matter is so multi-layered, complex and ever-evolving, my intention was to provide the viewer with a kaleidoscopic, immersive and thought-provoking visual journey that explores what it is like to be human in the digital age, attempting to critically question some of its issues question.

How do you yourself deal with life in a hyper-connected reality?

Finding the impossible and unrealized balance between screen time and offline, natural time.

Can you share a bit about the special techniques and lenses you use to take our viewers into these digital and virtual worlds?

Crafting the film’s visual language was equally challenging and fun, as we creatively used the same lenses typically used to enter new digital realms while trying to weave an immersive experience into the wonders of our everyday digital lives. The inspiring principle behind it is that today, almost everywhere there is human activity, there is a device connected to the Internet that is recording that activity. Therefore, the characters depicted in the film are narrated through constant interaction with raw footage recorded by the devices around them, including smartphones, laptops, “smart” appliances, surveillance cameras, VR headsets, and dash cams: The mechanical and virtual gaze reveals a new way of experiencing reality. All the characters we meet make use of a variety of commonplace digital technologies, which are always equipped with some sort of digital eye, recording their surroundings in a number of different formats, resolutions, and styles depending on their purpose: Vertical Intelligence Mobile phone gaze, or horizontal web camera field of view, infrared security cameras, virtual drones within VR platforms, satellite zenith appearances, 360° light spheres capturing every possible viewing direction, robot vacuum cleaner scanners generating point cloud images of apartments .

In trying to imagine and reconstruct the way machines see us, the film ultimately turns the familiar into something strange, uncanny, and alienating, and through its distorted lens we might recognize the media-saturated nature of our contemporary era. exist.