IN LIMBO
A film by Antoine Viviani
2015, 85 minutes
2015, 85 minutes
No. 027
DOCUMENTARY
DOCUMENTARY
Description
Does the Internet dream with our electric memories? What happens to all those countless photos and videos we upload? Featuring interviews with leading scientists and digital pioneers, In Limbo is a marvelous, poetic exploration of this new virtual reality – a meditation on time, memory and technology.
Increasingly, our lives are being recorded on our smartphones and the images then uploaded to the web. But what does it mean that all these wonderful, sad and at times painful memories are being stored in anonymous data warehouses mean? And what about the fact that all of these computer systems now know us better than we know ourselves?
These are the questions that filmmaker Antoine Viviani investigates from the point of view of a mysterious spirit, roaming around a maze of data servers. Accompanied by the spirit's poetic voice-over, spoken by writer Nancy Huston, the camera moves in slow tracking shots past the computers where all our memories are stored. The voice elbows its way through the endless data mounds, reporting poetically on what it finds: fragments of a proposal of marriage, a vacation – the moments we want to be able to recall at any cost. In the maze of data machines, the spirit also encounters the people who were once at the forefront of the digital revolution – digital shades of a far-off past. In interviews, they talk about history and the underlying ideals of that revolution.
Incorporating interviews with the the Internet’s founding fathers, as well as digital librarians and pioneers, such as Ray Kurzweil, Gordon Bell, Laurie Frick, George Dyson, and Paul Miller, In Limbo is a highly original and visually breathtaking charting of the internet's labyrinthine interior – and its soul.
Increasingly, our lives are being recorded on our smartphones and the images then uploaded to the web. But what does it mean that all these wonderful, sad and at times painful memories are being stored in anonymous data warehouses mean? And what about the fact that all of these computer systems now know us better than we know ourselves?
These are the questions that filmmaker Antoine Viviani investigates from the point of view of a mysterious spirit, roaming around a maze of data servers. Accompanied by the spirit's poetic voice-over, spoken by writer Nancy Huston, the camera moves in slow tracking shots past the computers where all our memories are stored. The voice elbows its way through the endless data mounds, reporting poetically on what it finds: fragments of a proposal of marriage, a vacation – the moments we want to be able to recall at any cost. In the maze of data machines, the spirit also encounters the people who were once at the forefront of the digital revolution – digital shades of a far-off past. In interviews, they talk about history and the underlying ideals of that revolution.
Incorporating interviews with the the Internet’s founding fathers, as well as digital librarians and pioneers, such as Ray Kurzweil, Gordon Bell, Laurie Frick, George Dyson, and Paul Miller, In Limbo is a highly original and visually breathtaking charting of the internet's labyrinthine interior – and its soul.
Festivals
Official Selection, CPH:DOX
Official Selection, International Film Festival Amsterdam
Official Selection, International Film Festival Amsterdam
