A Stretch of Time

A disembodied figure is carried off underground, where he encounters a vast living archive. Attached to this ever-expanding “network body” are capsules filled with fragments of thoughts. The only way our hero can escape is to fulfill the Sisyphean task that has been imposed on him.

A Stretch of Time is a new chapter in Ali Eslami’s ongoing project False Mirror, an artistic exploration of post-human life in digital spaces. The Iranian-born, Amsterdam-based artist won the IDFA DocLab Award for Best Immersive Non-Fiction in 2016 for his VR project DeathTolls Experience.

For this “flattie” film production, he used the virtual world of False Mirror as a film studio. The result is an intriguing blend of the languages of cinema, video games and virtual reality. It is as artificial as it is tangible, both real and unreal—a document from a world that exists only digitally.