Fiat Indicium

Video series

2019

In his book New dark age – Technology and the end of the future, James Bridle outlines the vast implications of our accelerated technological present and warns us of the seemingly dystopian and precarious trajectories we might be heading towards. He argues that the great contradiction of the information age is that the bigger and more complex the systems we rely upon become, the less and less we understand them and how they work. This also means that we are increasingly ignorant to if or how these systems can be used against us, and how to prevent them from doing so. When he speaks of a new dark age, he is referring to the increased absence of human agency within these systems and our systemic illiteracy. 

“What evaporates is agency and ownership: most of your emails, photos, status updates, business documents, library and voting data, health records, credit ratings, likes, memories, experiences, personal preferences and unspoken desires are in the cloud, on somebody else’s infrastructure.” (Bridle, 8) 

The metaphor of the cloud indicates that somewhere “up there” is an intelligent entity or object that absorbs and redistributes to us its vast seas of information. It has no gravitational pull, protected from the precarious fate of earthly affairs and physical hardware, hence we are encouraged to use the sky as a storage for our digital valuables.  

“Sanctus Internexus, mens mundi, affer me! Accipe mentem meam, transcriptam in tua nube! Mens mea est data mea memoria computare Ego sum forum aeternum”

Camera: Christopher David Logan, Martin Hilstad, Aage A. Mikalsen and Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir. Actors: Jessy Chenal, Jonas Greni, August Northug, Qianhui Qian, Lili Zaneta and Anna Ida Pezzot.