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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Anthropology
Why are witchcraft accusations so common across human societies?
4 minutes
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Subcultures
Drop into London’s eclectic skate scene, where newbies and old-timers find community
5 minutes
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Technology and the self
A deepfake porn victim confronts the pain of having her likeness stolen and vandalised
19 minutes
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Wellbeing
Born in China, Zee seeks a gender-affirming life in the American Midwest
11 minutes
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Chemistry
Why do the building blocks of life possess a mysterious symmetry?
12 minutes
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Rituals and celebrations
A whale hunt is an act of prayer for an Inuit community north of the Arctic Circle
8 minutes
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Cosmology
Tiny, entangled universes that form or fizzle out – a theory of the quantum multiverse
11 minutes
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Rituals and celebrations
A beginner’s guide to a joyful Persian tradition of spring renewal and rebirth
3 minutes
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Astronomy
The history of astronomy is a history of conjuring intelligent life where it isn’t
34 minutes