Uprooted

The making of Uprooted

My work began with a rough overview of the topic of Work 4.0 - the post-digital world of work. The topic is extremely complex and can be approached from many perspectives, but it was immediately clear to me to take a critical stance.

First, I developed a story that would serve as a vehicle for my reflections. In this story, an editor is replaced by an AI, so I wanted to show the effects on people and society. By setting it in a publishing house, I also wanted to show the differences between humans and AI through the cultural aspect of literature, as well as the ownership structure (power through technology). But the more I developed the story, the bigger and more expansive it became, so it no longer seemed suitable for this format. So I tried to extract a part of the story for the movie, but by taking away some elements, something was missing from my point of view. So I took another step back and tried to limit myself to what was essential for me and break it down to one aspect, which for me was the “alienation of labor”:

It places the human being very much at the center. In a world in which work and life are increasingly migrating to the digital or virtual space, people are moving further and further away from themselves. AI is gradually taking over or supporting every area of our lives. Instead of us humanizing AI, AI is dehumanizing us. Humans are becoming passive participants in their own lives. We become isolated in the real world while we socialize online. We prompt instead of thinking. Everything is just a copy of something. We lose control. Everything is interchangeable and irrelevant. I moved away from direct storytelling (in the sense of acting) to an atmospheric indirect narrative in order to make better use of the medium of photo film.

In order to express what I wanted to express, I drew on my above-mentioned story and took this as a mental template, from which the protagonist and the setting of the modern office building (which was once supposed to serve as the publishing house) remained. Inspired by the pictures by Gregory Crewdson shown in the seminar, I used the forest as an analog counterpart to our digital world. This should embody the inner life of my protagonist. Other people are not shown in the film to convey a sense of isolation and loneliness (technically there is one person in a picture, but because of the distance, the feeling is heightened).

Ultimately, the film should convey the feeling of alienation and loneliness in a digital work context, especially through the use of AI, and encourage the viewer to reflect on the human condition.