FIRST PHONE

What is it like to experience living through climate change and geopolitical unrest from the specific vantage point of the screen? Of platform capitalism and algorithms? As NPCs during epoch-making events, how do we make sense out of the apophenic experience of scrolling? 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. Text operates as image, metaphor as truth, and rhetoric as more than mere adornment.

Written and directed by Ruba Al-Sweel; editor Dominique Barbouth @fotolog.wtf

Spore Initiative, Berlin; Canal Projects, New York; Berlin Science Week, Berlin; Softer lab Copenhagen and others