After years of excessive alcohol consumption, an insurance company’s algorithm flags Mitch as too risky for life insurance. At first, he shrugs it off, but it slowly begins to send him into an existential crisis. What does it mean for a supposedly ‘objective’ data set to predict that you’re going to die early? Is it a fate you can escape? It might sound like the premise of a Black Mirror episode, but the experience was all-too-real for the US filmmaker Mitch McGlocklin. The incident inspired his celebrated and thought-provoking experimental short film Forever. Emphasising the feeling that his life has been reduced to data points, McGlocklin uses an animation technique that employs LiDAR technology, which AIs use to discern the human world. As a camera floats through a series of sparse digital environment, McGlocklin lands on an unexpectedly optimistic – and perhaps tongue-in-cheek – outlook on our increasingly data-defined times.
Director: Mitch McGlocklin
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Childhood and adolescence
Marmar is living through a devastating war – but she’d rather tell you about her new dress
8 minutes
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Meaning and the good life
Wander through the English countryside with two teens trying to make sense of the world
10 minutes
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Computing and artificial intelligence
The ‘cloud’ requires heaps of energy to stay aloft. Could synthetic DNA be the answer?
12 minutes
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Art
A puppeteer makes sense of an overwhelming world by shrinking it down to size
5 minutes
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History
There are fragments of Romani Gypsy history all over the UK – if one knows where to look
3 minutes
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Biology
Brilliant dots of colour form exquisite patterns in this close-up of butterfly wings
3 minutes
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Anthropology
Does Mogi’s future lie with her horses on the Mongolian steppe, or in the city?
16 minutes
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Genetics
Why it took a century to work out that humans interbred with Neanderthals
22 minutes
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Art
The sprawling mural that depicts an unflinching people’s history of Los Angeles
7 minutes