How do we bring our physical bodies with us into our inevitably digitally-bound futures?
Future Futures' 5 short dance films, now streaming on CBC Gem, explore our digital destiny
From Vancouver's acclaimed Company 605, Future Futures, streaming now on CBC Gem, is a collection of 5 short dance films that explore the digital destiny of humankind through a merging of camera and visual effects with choreographic vision. The experimental series collapses time to portray human culture at an unprecedented moment: the emergence of a new, autonomous and intelligent being — the digital reflection and culmination of ourselves.
In a state of mass transition, and forced into a bizarre coexistence alongside this growing presence, the remaining population of embodied "real" humans confront their own fears and curiosity of this new dawn while grieving what might be left behind in their looming obsolescence.
Through its otherworldly imagery, choreography, and driving electronic score, Future Futures is a strange, highly visual, and compellingly watchable exploration into what we are if no longer tied to our physical bodies, and how we will define humanity when being faced with a fading IRL existence.
About Future Futures:
Driven by movement and physicality, the Future Futures' films progress toward a not-so-distant future where the core characteristics of the human race are confronted by possible trajectories of technological singularity and a merging of artificial intelligence. It is a 21st Century re-imagining of Cartesian dualism, where the mind/body dialectic is replaced by flesh and blood body/mind versus a digital non-body/mind.
If our physical selves have been identified as detrimental to the planet, thus becoming necessarily obsolete, will the increasing exodus of our identities from an embodied form, and into a shared digital reality, also leave behind a way of knowing who we are? How do we cognitively and emotionally grapple with erasure of our bodies as we seize the new limitless extensions of human existence?
While fully embracing the absurdities of both science-fiction and contemporary dance, the bizarre world of Future Futures is only a slight exaggeration of the kind of preliminary de-platforming of the human body we see in our daily lives spent more and more inside of social media, Zoom meetings, AR filters and the world through a screen. So although these questions remain outlandishly alien and unanswerable — the time to start considering may be right now.
Future Futures charts a narrative arc of ever-evolving and increasingly prominent Digital Beings. What is initially introduced as an unexplained presence, seeming to resemble some sort of non-threatening holographic device, rapidly unfolds into a complex intersection between two types of beings: these new digital avatar-like people exploring and reinterpreting the physical world, and the remaining "real" Humans who, for the time being, still inhabit it.
With only sparse dialogue, scenes hone into the felt experience and contrasting physicality of characters as they attempt to simply coexist, and move through this period of massive societal change. The unnatural and effected movements of the digital characters, not bound by physics, is a kind of sleight of hand — a perfectly symbiotic relationship merging the mechanisms of the camera and the intensely specific choreographic vision of Company 605. Mapped onto the story structure of the sci-fi genre, the result is a highly visual and strikingly original take on the typical dance-on-screen. The Digitals show a beyond human ability to connect and move as one, making their growing presence extremely disturbing and alienating for some humans, while others show a genuine curiosity about what this change might feel like for themselves.
As the mass migration toward digital existence marches on, the embodied humans must cope with becoming marginalized in their own cities, streets and workplaces. Within their alien-like encounters, it's clear Digital and Human characters can still recognize part of themselves inside the other — an acknowledgement of their inherent link that opens a door to the emotional world of the digital characters, and problematizes traditional notions of sci-fi character relationships. Are the Digitals to be feared, embraced, or cautiously respected?
As the series progresses, the Humans must grapple with these questions, their personal definitions of "real," as well as their own growing understanding that this obsolete future is one they have led themselves into. Characters appear and reappear with episodes cutting across time, as the series builds into a greater existential collision between the world-altering prospect of an uploaded humanity and the dwindling few who are still firmly holding on, resisting the unfathomable surrender of their corporeal state in exchange for this unknown new beginning.
Future Futures is about the essence of humanity and what might be at stake if embodied experiences are replaced, and faded from the plane of daily reality. The range of associated emotions is complex — fear, grieving, acceptance, a curious anticipation for what lies ahead. The world that viewers enter — the uncanny choreography, compelling imagery and driving music — allows them space for a future-focused reverie on the fate of human kind.
Stream Future Futures now on CBC Gem.
