Immortality, home and elsewhere

Weaving around a theory of immortality based on the premise that our lives are a summation of all the information we consume and process, gleaned from existing theories from a number of scientific disciplines, the film draws on my personal history’s brush with a global nuclear disaster, to precipitate a meditation on the potential role of an individual in the imaginary film/event of our individual or collective death: as a protagonist, or as an extra appearing in a handful of frames at the very moment of their death. The (im)possibility of a singular setting for such an event is at question, and there is a temporal flattening accompanying the spacial flattening, both as a collapse of history implied by the end of potential futures, but also the flattening of time implicit in our fascination with ruin. The uncanny familiarity we gain with spaces through mainstream cinema, which is itself becoming increasingly domesticated, is not unlike what is made possible with streetview. By releasing locations such as the pyramids and the Taj Mahal, themselves monumental attempts at immortality, streetview is declaring itself as a competitor to tourism, tourism itself a chase of experience and self-documentation. The virtual experience may not quite compare to the real thing yet, but the mediated virtual experience carries the same indexical value as the mediated real thing, being one step removed from the physical world. The question of authenticity in terms of cinematic authorship as well as consumption remains to be answered. If you could experience everything that ever was, would you still be afraid?