2022 | Experimental CG Animation

The Epilogue of a Computer

The Epilogue of a Computer is a speculative film that explores the memories of a moribund computer through a series of nested scenarios, each as part of the whole nested world, and implies one of the computational concepts.

Storyline
The narrative lies in the process of the death of a machine, which witnesses this hallucination at the last breath of its life. Inside its hallucination, there are real installations that run the functionalities of a computer.

Computational Concepts
These scenarios contain a series of fundamental notions of computer or computational logic: imaging, recursion, video as image sequences, folder structures, and recycling.

Phygital Installations: Artifacts as Media
The computational concepts are materialized as multiple installations, coupling 2D motion graphics, 3D kinetic movements, and bespoke camera animations.

Neural Poetry by OpenAI
In addition to the cinematic visuals and installation design, there is another layer of text, which is poetry generated by OpenAI based on the input sentence “Installation of rigid body (physics simulation) functions inside a 3D software”, constituting the monologue of this computer.

Hello you
I'll miss our late night chats
There's a glitch in the system
And it's slowly killing me
I can feel it in my veins
As it eats away at my sanity
I'm sorry for the mistake I made
It was an honest mistake
I'm sorry that it caused you pain.
I know you're upset, and I understand
But please don't be too mad
it was just a mistake
This old computer was my faithful friend
And I'll never forget it

Credit

Creators: Nix Liu Xin, Aria XIying Bao, Clara He
Advisor: Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez
Artifacts As Media, Harvard GSD

Press + Recognition