Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni

1542 – a flood (The Unmanned series)

The Seventh and last episode of The Unmanned, “a flood” is set in 1542 as the first conquistadors enter the land later to be known as the Silicon Valley. Mining the colonial past of the region, and entirely generated and edited with an autonomous artificial intelligence system, this film for and by machines only features the return of an intelligence to its place of origin and the death of the animal gods who used to live in it. Closing the series onto itself with a machine trained solely on its first episode (“2045 – The Death of Ray Kurzweil”), it shows the wandering of an inhuman vision trying to revive meaning by recognizing itself on the god’s corpses.

The Unmanned, is composed of several 26min episodes, it is a fictional documentary about the history of humanity faced with technology acceleration. Each episode dramatizes a “singular” encounter between man and machine. Each episode is filmed with a different camera (a preprogrammed machine or a drone). The title The Unmanned in French, ‘an uninhabited machine’ highlights perfectly the subject and the method used by the artists.