Is simulation theory a way to shirk responsibility for the world we’ve created?

At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Digital Life initiative endeavours to create high-quality 3D digital models of living organisms – especially those on the brink of extinction. This modern Noah’s Ark is just one of the ways humanity is digitising a world in ecological peril. But what does this impulse, combined with the rise of ‘simulation theory’, say about us? Is the idea that we can digitally preserve and simulate biology, or that we already exist in a computer-simulated reality, merely a way to comfort ourselves as we drive our world further toward ecological collapse? In a collage pulled together from the world of digitisation, the experimental short Our Ark ponders whether these notions of parallel simulated worlds are a means of offering ourselves ‘solace in the face of paralysis’.