Fossilis

What separates the Earth, mind, body and machines? 'Probably nothing' argued a future archaeologist.

A glimpse into the far future: in search of the ultimate truth about the past, meditates with her brain-machine interface of a crude neural network, machine learning and virtual world-building, a paleo-media-ontologist—with the help of a researcher—digs and scavenging the imagination of the past to recontextualise and reflect what it is called fossil relic in their time; a mountain of invisible electronic waste buried in a tropical landscape of the South.

Fossilis is an oneiric cinema, a phantasmal science-fiction prognosis, an essay film and a tale of the verdant inferno of technological legacy, resonating the complexity of electronic waste in the 21st century of Asia where most of the discarded electronics—due to the planned obsolescence—in the planet is dumped and buried. With live-action sets built from waste materials, scenes from flea market of cannibalization parts, 3D assets and environment from abandoned projects and AI images generated from thousands of unused images from a personal dataset, Fossilis offers more than just concepts, narratives, and representation of e-waste as an issue, but also engages in the process, development, and modes of film production that involves actual, both digital and physical, waste and e-waste objects as means of artistic practice.