EMULATOR (2024) is a hybrid speculative film/essay that interrogates the influence of psychedelics and the California Ideology on the trajectory of computing, both in our consensual reality and an alternate timeline. In the latter, Wilheim Reich's Orgone theory catalyzes the emergence of wetware and a collapsed, post-AI world, where the miraculous and absurd outputs of fleshy AIs are trafficked by the eponymous Emulators, who mimic these flawed artifacts as a form of cognitive camouflage.
Presented as part of the Semester of Bits and Atoms at the Transmedia Research Institute in Fano, Italy.
Special Thanks to Filippo Rosati and Daniel Felstead for their contributions. Emulator logo and title animation by Darius Ou.
An annotated script is available for download HERE
