The Unmanned - 1759 - Mil Trois Cens Quarante Huyt

The Unmanned - 1759 - Mil Trois Cens Quarante Huyt

In whiche a lemyng starre returneth in the yeer foretolde and alle thing that spak to us turneth ayeyn to silence

2017 · 26 min

Sixth episode of The Unmanned and sharing the same camera movements as the episode “1997 – The Brute Force”, “Mil troi cens quarante huyt” refers to the appearance of a comet in 1759 – thus validating the computation and rational prediction of its return by the British astronomer and mathematician Edmond Halley. The action of the film goes back four centuries earlier, in 1348, and unfolds around one unique scene: the escape and the death of a bishop and his court in a forest during the first major outbreak of the Black Plague which was said at the time to be born in the hair of comets.

Directed by Raphaël Siboni

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The Unmanned - 1834 – La Mémoire de Masse

The Unmanned - 1834 – La Mémoire de Masse · 2015

The Unmanned - 1834 – La Mémoire de Masse

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There Is No Sexual Rapport · 2011

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The Unmanned - 1953 – The Outlawed

The Unmanned - 1953 – The Outlawed · 2018

The Unmanned - 1953 – The Outlawed

Third episode of The Unmanned series and replicating the editing structure of “1834 – La Mémoire de Masse”, “The Outlawed” takes place in August 1953 on the island of Corfu, in Greece, at the Club Méditerranée resort where Alan Turing spent his last summer. On a sunny afternoon, the mathematician and inventor of the modern computer, subjected to hormonal treatment after being convicted for his homosexuality, embarks on a makeshift raft to study the morphogenesis of marine organisms. As he explores the coast, the raft progressively drifts away. In the absence of any shore, lost at sea, an ungrounded scene unfolds.

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The Unmanned - 2045 - The Death of Ray Kurzweil

The Unmanned - 2045 - The Death of Ray Kurzweil · 2014

The Unmanned - 2045 - The Death of Ray Kurzweil

First episode of the series The Unmanned, “The Death of Ray Kurzweil” shows the wandering of Ray Kurzweil (promoter of a technological immortality and of transhumanism) along with his father-son, Friedrich, in the vastness of a tropical forest. This film of anticipation, entirely filmed by drones, takes place in 2045, at the critical threshold of technological singularity.

The Unmanned - 1922 - The Uncomputable

The Unmanned - 1922 - The Uncomputable · 2014

The Unmanned - 1922 - The Uncomputable

Fourth episode of The Unmanned series, “The Uncomputable” is the story of a failure: the building in the northern plains of Scotland of a giant climate prediction factory by meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. This enormous inverted terrestrial globe supposed to host 64,000 women-computers and able to forecast the world weather was never built. Partly shot in a wind tunnel (used for aerodynamics simulation), this episode shows the impossible attempt at building the factory and the collapse of its hypothesis of a global computation. As a storm breaks out over the construction site for the simulation, the film itself and all of the parameters are progressively turned inside out.

The Unmanned - 1997 - The Brute Force

The Unmanned - 1997 - The Brute Force · 2014

The Unmanned - 1997 - The Brute Force

Second episode of The Unmanned series, “The Brute Force” reconstructs the minutes following Garry Kasparov’s defeat against the IBM Deep Blue computer on 11 May 1997. A camera with computer-programmed movements scrutinises the elements of an empty setting after the chess champion has left the scene, thus abandoning it to the disproportion of a world without its own scale.

The Unmanned - 0000 - The Axiom

The Unmanned - 0000 - The Axiom · 2014

The Unmanned - 0000 - The Axiom

Inspired by the writings of the feral child Kaspar Hauser and told by the young Friedrich, both father and son of Ray Kurzweil, this story unfolds on the microscope images of a blade cutting through metal. Filmed at the scale of a fold of matter, this cut is the axiom on which the first season of The Unmanned rests.

The Unmanned - 1542 - a flood

The Unmanned - 1542 - a flood · 2017

The Unmanned - 1542 - a flood

Seventh and last episode of The Unmanned, “a flood” is set in 1542 as the first conquistadors enter the land later to be known as the Silicon Valley. Mining the colonial past of the region, and entirely generated and edited with an autonomous artificial intelligence system, this film for and by machines only features the return of an intelligence to its place of origin and the death of the animal gods who used to live in it. Closing the series onto itself with a machine trained solely on its first episode (“2045 – The Death of Ray Kurzweil”), it shows the wandering of an inhuman vision trying to revive meaning by recognising itself on the god’s corpses.

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