In Limbo

We are increasingly outsourcing our memories to devices. We record our entire lives in the photos and videos we take with our smartphones. But what does the fact that all these wonderful, sad and at times painful memories are being stored in anonymous data warehouses mean? And what about the fact that all of these computer systems now know us better than we know ourselves? These are the questions that filmmaker Antoine Viviani investigates from the point of view of a mysterious spirit, roaming around a maze of data servers. Accompanied by the spirit's poetic voice-over, spoken by Nancy Huston, the camera moves in slow tracking shots past the computers where all our memories are stored. The voice elbows its way through the endless data mounds, reporting poetically on what it finds: fragments of a proposal of marriage, a vacation – the moments we want to be able to recall at any cost. In the maze of data machines, the spirit also encounters the people who were once at the forefront of the digital revolution – digital shades of a far-off past. In interviews, they talk about history and the underlying ideals of that revolution. The film is a poetic, essayistic contemplation of time, memory and the nature of technology. The first part of this documentary project, , was in IDFA's 2014 Doclab competition, which Viviani won in 2011 with , an essayistic web documentary on artistic interventions in the urban environment.