Repost of a film I made with some friends for a uni class.
The theme was ‘the city at work’.
A dramatic exploration of the communication barriers between the city’s infrastructural interfaces and its inhabitants; the objectivity conventionally ascribed to the former is questioned through the negative space resultant from the removal of the latter.
The film depicts what is assumed to be any normal working day of an unseen individual. The protagonist’s reflexive circadian rhythm is mapped by the mundane malevolence of the machine whose checkpoints and informants have permeated every level of both the physical and incorporeal city.
A certain ambiguity allows for divergent interpretation; are the machines conspirators in a premeditated plot, or merely mute witnesses to the commonplace?
Concurrent humour and disquiet portray an ambivalence pertinent to society’s simultaneous dependence on and distance from technology.
Fundamentally the film seeks to challenge preconceived notions of convenience, spatial liberty and the social consequences of exponential technological development.
The machines portrayed can be categorised in the following ways:
The archetypal architectural manifestations of automation: lifts, escalators, automatic doors
Labour-negating systems: self-service checkouts, ticket machines, ticket barriers
Indispensable infrastructural coordinators: train signals, traffic signals, pedestrian crossings
Personal mobile technology: smart phones, laptops, portable media devices
Ross Brown, Alastair Cassell, Peter Cassidy, Chao Nie
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