Artifacts connects fragments of an audiovisual transmission from a distance. In the fog of the events that unfold, the outlines of actors appear, revealing a catastrophe that they have caused. Artifacts is a speculative fiction film that combines computer animation created in Unity3D with documentary footage from the present day and from the archive. The footage is complemented by a deep fake actress, and AI also entered the film-making process when writing the script – the film captures situations directly proposed by a neural network. As speculative fiction, Artifacts depicts an ecological disaster that seeps from reality into the virtual realm, threatening the existence of users who have “moved in” to shelter themselves from the outside world. What begins as a trivial error in fluid and particle simulation, suddenly affects the entire ecosystem of this distant metaverse. Visual and sound effects come to the fore, refusing to sustain the simulation of life.
