Reality, Virtuality and Cognitive Reterritorialization

Cinema is one of the first virtual and immersive environments in the full sense of the two adjectives (virtual and immersive) and this is why it has been recognized, from its earliest days, as an important ideological apparatus. Soviet montage school from 1920s was one of the first film movements that understood the power of cinematic tool in conveying a desirable meaning across the population. Cinema played an important role in unifying and mobilizing the country around a common goal of creating a desirable socialist and communist future for the nation. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) already demonstrated the cinematic potential for engaging patriotic sentiments with the audience but also promoted racist ideas that were commonly accepted in the period, but from our perspective, are not likely the ideas that we would like to shape our future. The cinematic technology as a product of human mind materialises the human aspiration for self-recreation. Cinematography was initially shaped by our cognitive landscape but very soon began stretching the boundaries of this embodied filmic image due to the factor of difference between human eye and kino-eye (from Vertov to Deleuze). Since the beginning of its history film has definitely reshaped our mental model making it probably better prepared to absorb the disembodied virtual worlds created by today’s and tomorrow’s digital technology. Landscapes created by AI stage another challenge for humanity. The digital world of the Internet is more democratic and populist than film but this is exactly why it is more susceptible to biases and constraints of human cognitive environment and this becomes more evident with the rise of AI technology. AI is the most powerful tool not only for imagining new worlds but also as a search engine for retrieving information from the immensity of human digital archive. The latter is perhaps more important that the former, since the present AI technology cannot operate beyond the pool of human experience that is digitally available. Besides numerous “specialized alignment techniques” AI responses are primarily based on statistical probability and “influenced by the quantity and frequency of patterns found in training data” and these represent only a fragment of human experience. There is still the issue of underrepresentation of certain cultures and perspectives available to AI. AI will without a doubt influence our future realities, both desirable and perhaps less desirable. The situation is not that much unlike the situation with The Birth of a Nation and yet is incomparably different. The difference stems from the fact that films are interpreted by humans themselves and in the digital world AI becomes not only the search engine but also the tool for interpreting human (cognitive) reality. Here lies the danger of misrepresentation and falsification of the ultimate truth. I will analyse the film Free Guy (2021) to explore the following research questions: how is human reality transferred to a virtual video game scenario, how this scenario offers an insight into our conception of reality, and how is film used to mediate these worlds.