Forever
2021 · 7m · USA
Directed by Mitch McGlocklin
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
After an AI algorithm denies his life insurance application, a man rendered in LiDAR point-cloud imagery meditates on how non-human intelligence assigns value to a human life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
LiDAR point-cloud animation about an AI denying life insurance — Sundance technology fetishism with a 'big idea' wrapper. The form is genuinely novel, but the philosophy is undergraduate.
LiDAR point-cloud imagery as the entire visual register for a meditation on AI's value-assignment is the rare case where the formal apparatus and the subject are genuinely the same gesture. Sundance 2021 selection was earned; this is the McGlocklin signature.
Shot entirely with LiDAR scanning — that's a formal commitment where the technology IS the thesis: the AI's denial of life insurance rendered in the very point-cloud data such systems use. 7 minutes at Sundance 2021. The technique and subject collapsing into each other is rare.
Festivals
- Sundance 2021