Light Years Apart (2021 - 2025)

Film Website: https://lya-movie.com
Interactive Single channel HD video, 19mins TRT

In Light Years Apart, Fula, an interdimensional being, wraps time and space to travel between parallel dimensions. The film, an interactive science fiction, investigates varying processes of ‘looking’ and ‘engagement’ within cinematic spectatorship.  Utilizing biometric data and computer vision technology, Light Years Apart posits multiple trajectories within a branching narrative structure pitting the joyous affair of Fula's inner life against its bleak exterior. The spectator's engagement within this framework can grant or bar access. To "see" Fula, one must first foreground her within one's field of vision and surrender to her point of view, a charged provocation that fosters an embodied awareness and gaze shift.

Light Years Apart (2025), starring Ronis Aba, Nia Simone, and Zipporah Wilson was made possible with contributions from Creative Technologist and Backslash fellow, Heidi Minghao He; Choreographer, Kyle Marshall; and Director of Photography, Daniele Sarti through generous support and sponsorship from Backslash at Cornell Tech. The Backslash at Cornell Tech fund supports bleeding-edge technological interventions into artistic practice. It collides students, faculty, and artists–both on and off campus–providing grants for artworks, art tools, and art activities that engage the latest emerging digital technologies.

Director’s Statement:

I am interested in the spatial-temporal articulations of the body within discursive urban space. Through the formal praxes of portraiture, moving images, sculpture, and performance, I explore how the body, as material, articulates frameworks of globality, identity, and place. Critically aware of self, I employ varying degrees of subjectivity to shift axes of language and power within representational practice. Utilizing the values and semiotics of black culture, industrial and domestic objects, and the material properties of film, I foreground phenomenological blackness, the intricate and wide-ranging dimensions of black inner life.

In Light Years Apart, I contend with the history of biometrics and surveillance technologies, particularly in the subjugation and continued oppression of black bodies. How might the body within this framework be used as a mode of contention, a decolonial praxis, that subverts the logic of surveillance and domination? To answer that question, I examine the ways in which my framework resists what Black American writer and critic, Ralph Elison, deems the "un-visible,"[2] the hyper-visible black subject devoid of humanness within systems of anti-blackness. The body within this schema functions as an architecture of control in cinematic discourse, a corporeal device that works with technology to grant or bar access to my protagonist's interiority. Although Fula is hyper-visible across varying timelines, to "see" her requires the body's admission to her point of view. The inner folds of Fula's joy, subjectivity, curiosity, and wonder are brought to the fore through instances of high engagement. One's engagement within this framework, that is one's position in space, eye gaze, and movement is crucial to the ordering of time and the registry of meaning. It is only when Fula's humanness is foregrounded within the cinematic world does she become "seen." And that registry is contingent upon the embodied awareness of the spectator.

This film began as an artistic query inspired by the latest developments in emerging technologies. I wanted to produce an experience on screen that explored and critiqued the vast capabilities of AI and machine learning frameworks within an immersive interactive film that (1) interrogated the racialized gaze and (2) considered both the history and evolution of anti-black surveillance and domination. Drawing from a lineage of interactive frameworks, black literature, and theory, Light Years Apart fosters an embodied awareness and gaze shift, compelling the viewer to think critically about the ontology of the gaze and the embeddedness of bias within processes of looking. It highlights the quasi-symbiotic relationship between man and machine and speaks to its potential within cinematic discourse and social movements of resistance.

Notes:

[1]: See Backslash at Cornell Tech at https://backslash.org/about

[2]: See Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Duke University Press, 2015. See also Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man, Penguin Books, 2014

Light Years Apart (2021 - 2025) by Christie Neptune. Single channel interactive film, 19mins TRT.