Staff Select Premiere: The terror of our digital lives
The age of digital is bringing about a new reality: infinite screen time. Instead of experiencing our surroundings Our intake of information concepts, images, and sounds is packaged via a series of ones and zeros, ready to consume. The screen-driven lifestyle is more common and frustrating for the modern-day creative. Apart from entertainment, artists are dependent on screens for work, employing digital devices to make additional digital content that's intended to be consumed by yet another screen. The result is a loop that sometimes feels a little overwhelming, but inexplicably.
It is a tense audio-visual sequence that has the possibility of creating seizures in those suffering from epilepsy that is photosensitive. Viewer discretion is advised.
Sha fills this surreal digital experience with familiar imagery from the creative field, like Wacom tablets and transparent grey-and-white-checkered backgrounds. When the movie progresses the visuals turn grotesque and begin to match the quickening beat, resulting in an increased panic that is familiar to anyone who's spent their nights sitting in offices that are empty, gazing at a glowing screen while racing against the clock and the looming deadlines. Sha says she was looking to convey the "kind of pain that is never ending and can't be relieved with medication. There is no way to get out of it." The repetition of music and images builds to a tipping point, where neither the emotion as well as the imagery are able to be sustained. What ensues is twenty seconds of digital chaos. After that, the repeating loop caves in on it, and then reveals some time of tranquility and then the cycle begins again.
The maddening loop of "It is My Fault" is an honest, bleak message for our ever-repeating digital lives. But if our everyday reality is almost entirely composed of digital experience that are brimming with emojis, and on-screen entertainment, what are the simulated worlds created by VFX artists like Sha? It's possible that Sha is right. Perhaps there isn't a solution to escape from it and it is our fault.