![]() ![]() In the case of the more adventurous psychonauts accepting these figurative ideas as literal fact, some even attempt to control the illusion.Īscher’s first impression of simulation theory came through the many landmarks of science fiction engaging with it, from key text The Matrix and the writings of Philip K Dick to odd episodes of The Twilight Zone and Lost in Space. From VR video games to pop culture, any number of metaphors speak to the core concept of a dimension that can be seen through by those who know how to look. Plato posited that we could be shackled in a cave, mistaking the shadows on the wall for the things casting them. We could be brains in a vat, receiving electrical stimuli through wires manipulated by scientists, or perhaps we’re nothing more than bytes of data on some intelligent being’s hard drive. Coincidences we accept as quirks of chance are just imperfections in the system we’ve been plugged in to, whatever shape it might take. Though Gude and his enlightened brethren would have us believe that there’s no such thing. These projects have a way of attracting those.” The fact that putting these animated avatars into this frame looks like a satire of the Zoom world we’ve been living in for the past 10 months is a weird, fun stroke of luck. It all felt appropriate, and to be frank, it allowed us to save money. As we interacted with each other, in a way, we were only pixels and colored dots and audio output to one another. “I thought doing all this through a digital intermediate was on-theme with these stories. “It’s a strange coincidence, because we actually started filming these interviews in 2019,” Ascher tells the Guardian over the phone as he awaits his premiere in a virtual Sundance. It’s an inspired maneuver, both an apt formal rhyme with the material and, after months of meetings conducted through laptop screens, an unexpected parody of quarantine’s banal isolation. It wasn’t long before he realized that the same technique could be applied to enliven the otherwise inert footage he’d gotten from his many online one-on-ones. For such a necessarily mind-bending topic, Ascher embraced animation to an extent previously unseen in his filmography, rendering the experiences recounted as uncanny abstractions in a dreamworld of digital artifice. His latest feature takes an all-angles look at the burgeoning culture of “simulation theory” and its adherents, people who believe that the reality we all take for granted is nothing more than a projection the puny human brain perceives as truth. ![]() Ascher’s body of work pays patient, open-minded attention to eccentrics harboring unusual obsessions, whether that’s with the phenomenon of sleep paralysis (as in his film The Nightmare) or the myriad secrets hiding within Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining (as in his breakout Room 237). ![]()
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