26 min
The Unmanned, is composed of several 26min episodes, it is a fictional documentary about the history of humanity faced with technology acceleration. Each episode dramatizes a “singular” encounter between man and machine. Each episode is filmed with a different camera (a preprogrammed machine or a drone). The title The Unmanned – in French, ‘an uninhabited machine’ highlights perfectly the subject and the method used by the artists. The series uses as a starting point Ray Kurzweil (RK), a researcher described as the “the pioneer of Silicon Valley”. Kurzweil popularized the theory of singularity, as a point of “discontinuity” or inevitable rupture where a machine auto-generates itself to overtake man. Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni’s series starts with Ray Kurzweil’s death and the beginning of the machine reign. For Ray Kurzweil and many other positivist researchers, the theory of singularity goes along with an important financial and political project. Considerable investments (particularly from Google where RK heads of a laboratory) apply especially to genetics and biotechnology. Kurzweil’s real project lies behind the theory of singularity: immortality through technological rebirth. This research aims at slowing down the process of aging and bringing our parents back to life. Episode 1 is an image of the world in 2045, as seen by Kurzweil. He would then be 97 years old and spend his time with a young child improving his education. This portrait is the accomplishment of Ray Kurzweil’s reasoning project, the moment when he would have brought back his father (Friedrich Kurzweil). Therefore the series starts from the end, 2045, the moment where Ray Kurzweil can finally die because he is replaced by his son who is actually his father. The episode was filmed by a drone in a tropical forest of Mexico.
The collaborative work of Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni is part of a reflection on the history of cinema, science, and technology. For them, cinema is a technological invention which fundamentally transforms our relationship to the world. Giraud and Siboni are fascinated by technological acceleration. So much so that they imagine the possibility of a cinema without a human figure; one which does not subject bodies to the frame, nor bend gestures to duration. Each of their films bring radically different temporalities that are foreign to our present. They choose to film in hidden places, like the particle accelerator under the Louvre museum in La Mesure Louvre (2011), or abandoned places like the Greek temple in Bassae-Bassae (2012) where human absence is hollowly felt. Giraud and Siboni are also inspired by popular culture, micro-histories and major political conspiracies.
Three men with their backs to each other, dressed similarly in dark colors, stare straight at the camera...
A Tim Burton Exhibition Is Coming To The Design Museum | Londonist A Tim Burton Exhibition Is Coming To The Design Museum In 2024 By Hannah Newlon-Trujillo Hannah Newlon-Trujillo A Tim Burton Exhibition Is Coming To The Design Museum In 2024 See artworks, storyboards and costume designs by Tim Burton...
Maya Watanabe’s video installation Bullet unfolds within the context of the Peruvian justice and forensic systems...
YUMA o la tierra de los amigos (YUMA, or the Land of Friends) by Carolina Caycedo is a large mural containing a series of satellite photographs mounted on acrylic...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor, through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
Study of History III by Subas Tamang is an etching and aquatint print based on photographs taken by German photographer Volkmar Wentzel in 1949...