Type: Video collage

Intention: Two of the primary disruptive forces in human civilisation are religion and technology, fuelling some of the greatest questions we face as a species: Why are we here? What is the point of consciousness? Who are our gods? Is this authentic experience or a dream? Is this reality or a simulation? Is religion a force for good or does it ultimately lead to corruption and oppression? Will advances in technology bring about a utopia or our demise? Can we ever be truly free?

This piece attempts to examine these philosophical riddles by mining decades of Western pop-culture films for visual fragments that can speak in shorthand, the slices of manipulated imagery layering and repeating to illustrate our ever-shifting cultural narratives and the emergence of new perspectives.

Source material:

Metropolis, 1927
The Ten Commandments, 1956
Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, 1956
2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
Phase IV, 1974
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 1979
Tron, 1982
Brainstorm, 1983
Donnie Darko, 2001
The Immortals, 2011
The Tree of Life, 2011
*Glitch fragment by glitch-artist Max Capacity

File: MP4 / 123.4MB — 2560x1440 — 21.35 seconds

Tools: iMovie, Topaz Video AI, PhotoMosh Pro, Final Cut Pro

Process: video clips are “found” on the net, edited into fragments, upscaled via AI (which can lend some fragments an almost painterly quality as the upscaling process is far from perfect at this juncture), manipulated in PhotoMosh Pro, layered, edited and manipulated in Final Cut Pro, then fed again through PhotoMosh Pro for subtle tweaking before exporting as a final compressed file.

**A larger 4K-size file is available should collectors wish a larger copy. You can contact me using DM at my Twitter account (@matau_eth) and I can send the larger file via a sharing service like WeTransfer. Should a collector possess the 4K-size file and resell the work, the collector is then responsible for transferring the 4k-size file to the new owner.