On Alignment

Traveling safely through a hyperspeed duct towards your destination, you are invited into a daydream, freshly generated by your personal algorithm. You delve into a retrospective of technology's birth; a collective imagination, drawing from classic films, advertisements, documentaries, and home videos. Contemplating the advent of mass consumerism in the 1950s and the rise of smart technologies, the dream highlights the tragicomic aspects of our relationship with technological progress.

Once imagined as tools to simplify tasks, machines are now creeping into our communication and social life, shedding light on the convergence of human and machine. Depicted is an evolution that steers us towards compatibility—requiring humans to imitate machines—instead of adapting tools to the human context.

The piece reflects on the mystification surrounding new technologies. Ones that increasingly operate in ways we cannot comprehend, cloak themselves in nebulous language, and distance us from corporeality. We no longer question the presence and essentiality of these in our daily lives—which leads to wonder, what could a human-free future look like?

On Alignment features a 17′6″ short film, three prints, and a video loop on a CRT monitor. The project was made during a residency at Petrohradská Kolektiv in Prague, Czech Republic.