first phone

first phone (2024)

What is it like to experience living through climate change and geopolitical unrest from specific vantage point of the screen? As NPCs during epoch-making events that are incoherent but full of affect and memetics? 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. 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 the era of chaos.

Director: Ruba Al Sweel

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