Knowledge is power, but data is something more than that. Data are the quanta of knowledge, the basic components of science, the foundations of theories and the biometrics that allow us new means of self-knowledge and medical intervention. If the universe is information, if the human brain represents the universe as information (as two theories run), then data form the building blocks of all we know, and all that may exist within and without ourselves. Identity, on the genetic level, is data, at least as far as the nature side of the nature/nurture equation runs. But data, now, is also a commodity. Perhaps the principle commodity driving the techno-economic present. And like all economic systems, like all power, it lends itself to abuse. The age of information has degraded into the age of data, and how we navigate it now has vast implications for the future, its risks and possibilities.
As a part of the Human Connectome Project, subjects were scanned with functional MRI at the high spatial resolution, while watching a short film clip (from the BBC) showing various human actions and expressions. In the first part, the visualized activity of each brain is also rendered as sound, with
"Not the ghost in the machine, but the body in the medium is the central dilemma of modern communications…" – John Durham Peters The World : In a possible near future, where quantifying of the self is taken to its logical extreme, every person has their own "supermetric". This is an inf
The future of farming is emerging in some unexpected places: a school in west Baltimore. A garage in St. Louis. A snow-covered farm in Maine. Open Source Stories: Farming for the Future takes you to those places and shows you the people who are shaping the future of agriculture. They are teachers, s
In a fully automated society, a smart assistant who helped build the current regime decides to join a resistance group and start a revolution. Will she succeed? What was she waiting for this whole time? And is she even human anymore? The film was created using public domain archive footage and multi
Why does he say "swimwear" when he sees René Magritte's painting of a naked woman? Is he too shy to say "breast", "butt" or "vagina"? Perhaps he has mainly been exposed to product pictures and was never introduced to art? The film "I'm Not Sure" shows how an App, designed to be a vision-aid f
1957, New York. A Tibetan monk rents an automatic sequence computer. The monks seek to list all of the names of God, and they hire two Westerners to install and program the machine.
BIG DATA is the paranoid pop music brainchild of Alan Wilkis. In "L1ZY," Big Data presents a series of commercials in which a typical family is terrorized by his revolutionary new A.I. product, L1ZY.
The United States were at the brink of the Cold War. Because of their successful nuclear attacks during World War 2, they created the so-called strategy of mutually assured destruction. As part of the so-called strategy of mutually assured destruction, the US produced a list of over 2,000 nuclear ta
My grandmother was convinced that the only animal that made the same mistake twice is the human being. An essay short film about my very own Internet, a parallel world where memory loss, errors, surveillance and addiction smear everything and everyone.
We are all dancing to the same beat longing for the next advancement to come. We leave it to the companies to design our digital world, we are fine being told. But what happens if we escape from the mainstream internet and meet our digital self? Would we finally take action with what has to be done?
A geneticist creates a website that pairs an individual with their ideal genetic partner for children "The Perfect 46 raises disturbing (and critical) questions about the seductive power of technology," comments local author and science writer K.C. Cole, "and features a main character who seems not
Somewhere in the universe a group of planets within a solar system untouched by man is facing a threat when an asteroid carrying an anomalous organism gets into the sun's gravitational force; The planets, each governed by 3D fractals sculptures as a symbolic representation of nature, will be going t
Newt Studios created this scientific animation to capture the dynamic life inside our cells. Marvel at the exquisite energy-producing organelles found in the cytoplasm –– mitochondria. A field of drifting mitochondria reveal the architecture of their functional components. Their membrane
A transcendental film inspired by Marcel Duchamp's "Anemic Cinema." I set out to create a film composed within a circular frame. This circular composition led directly to using the number pi for the underlying structure. Having the digits of pi sung on the soundtrack is an homage to "Einstein on the
"Structures of Nature" is an audiovisual journey through the inner worlds of experiences in the form of a three-part interaction between four narrators, twelve violoncellos, emergent sound events and rhythmicized synaesthetic video sequences. A symbiosis of visual processes as well as natural and ar
"Two Songs For a Changeling Earth" is a creative meditation on human and geological time. It consists of two related video works which arise from an engagement with two major collections housed at Geoscience Australia in Canberra: the National Mineral and Fossil Collection and the Petroleum Data Rep
In 2027, hundreds of global surveillance companies are spying on the private lives of citizens. I.R.I.S. is one of them.
By studying the work of painter Rembrandt van Rijn closely and with deep learning algorithms, Face Detection technology and a 3D printer The Next Rembrandt was brought to life. The documentary follows the exciting creative process of this unique painting of both the seventeenth and twenty-first cent
An interview is conducted exploring methods used to facilitate a real research project whose aim it is to capture and analyze human micro-expressions for use by a variety of industries (including lie detection and entertainment/animation). But the particular research or the use of human subjects is
With a series of color filters, a team of researchers uses a telescope in Teruel, Spain, to develop a three-dimensional cartography of a big chunk of the universe. This mapping captures nearby objects within our solar system, such as asteroids; stars of our galaxy, other galaxies, vast clusters of g
A software engineer discovers that the internet has become conscious... and wants to test-drive human bodies. This web pilot combines absurdist performance, machine learning, and live data-mining of dialogue from Twitter to tell the darkly comic modern love story of one couple's radical experiment i
A meticulous gardener tends to his plastic paradise to the eerie sounds of space.
Movie demonstrates the uniquely human features of the human blastocyst stage embryo compared to to mouse. Day6 : Blastocyst stage Human blastocysts are used to study lineage specification and self-organization, which show species-specific features (Nature 2016, Deglincerti and Croft et al) relevant
The story of Chelsea Manning, not as a Wikileaks 'hacktivist', but as a young American soldier simultaneously going through a crisis-of-consciensce and a crisis-of-gender-identity. Animated in a rotoscoped pixel-art style and using dialogue from Chelsea's online conversations, the film explores issu
'The Super Recogniser' tells the story of Scott (Jacob Anderson), a seemingly normal young man with a very special talent. Thanks to his exceptional skills of 90% facial recognition, Scott has been recruited to work in a secret government initiative. Under the watchful eye of his tough-talking super
MERIDIAN PLAIN maps an enigmatic distant landscape excavated from hundreds of thousands of archival still images, forecasting visions of a possible future, transmitted from a mechanical eye. "With her newest project, the dazzling Meridian Plain, Kraning moves in a slightly different direction, still
A former baseball player forced to quit her career due to multiple sclerosis, is now being taken care ofby a robot and a Smart House. A journey between dreams and harsh reality.
Triangulated sites (Biosphere 2, Sunset Footprints, Casa Grande Domes) of virtual realities in the Sonoran Desert trace visionary intersections of the cultural and natural information systems that struggle against containment. Parables of ritualistic impermanence are rendered in the physical reliqua
Over 6,600 satellites have been launched into space since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957. 3,600 are currently in operation and launch frequencies are ever increasing to satisfy our global thirst for more communication, data and broadcast channels. In 2012 I began a long-term partnership w
A serene tour through the diffuse interstellar matter in our Galaxy.
Diffusion MRI can provide information on the organization of neuronal tissue in vivo . Based on these images, fiber tract pathways can be reconstructed that represent the axonal wiring of the brain. Anatomical knowledge lets us select specific fiber bundles connecting two brain regions, in this case