Somewhere on the Internet, there is a space of 250 square kilometres in which individuals gather in a community to simulate a survivalist fiction. Under the guise of avatars, a film crew enters this place and makes contact with the ‘locals’. This mysterious, post-apocalyptic rural landscape is revealed as a meeting place, where stories, ideas and friendships are shared. Slowly the players drop their masks to reveal their realities, their daily lives, their relationships of love and friendship. Mixing their memories of the game with the stories of their real lives, a group will take us on a walk on the borders of the Internet.
By going to the edge of the game, in search of the limits of this place, the film explores the first steps of the virtualisation of our lives, and questions the future of our world.
Content warning: graphic violence
Guilhem Causse was born in Narbonne in 1993, and entered the School of Fine Arts of Montpellier in 2012. There he developed a style of work revolving around the relationship between image and sound, in the form of installations and video projections, halfway between cinema, performance and contemporary art. He is fascinated by collapsology and is interested in recording natural and meteorological phenomena, which he then combines with virtual images in timeless spaces where the viewer is invited to settle.
In 2017 he got his DNSEP (master’s degree in plastic expression) and developed his research around the film Solaris, which he reconsidered in a series of video and sound works, in the form of hypnotic and immersive installations.
Born in Lyon in 1992, Quentin L’helgoualc’h got a DNSEP (master’s degree in plastic expression) at the School of Fine Arts in Montpellier in 2017. Then in 2018 he joined the post-graduate art programme. He developed a form of work which mixes several mediums such as sculpture, video and drawing. In 2017 he directed Marlowe Drive, a documentary immersed in the virtual world, in collaboration with Ekiem Barbier and Guilhem Causse. In 2019 and 2020 he made two video pieces, Between Empty Things and Cristaux Liquides, which combine live action and 3D animation, to deal with the thin digital spaces. In 2021 he joined the Fresnoy, the National Studio of Contemporary Arts, where he directed the fiction film Les Neiges électriques.
Les Neiges électriques (2021), Cristaux liquides (2020), Between Empty Things (2019), Marlowe Drive (2017)
