The mind is yours.
Until keeping up
has a price.
A family inherits the promise of neural augmentation.
And the choices it leaves behind.
An earlier film experiment exploring AI simulation and neural interfaces. The current proposal develops the family story and its relationship to simulation further. Watch Branch 2036 ↗
A better mind.
A narrower choice.
In 2085, the technology inside your brain determines which doors open.
Viktor resisted it. Mara adapted to it. Nico has never known life without it. But his Basic implant funded by the government cannot keep pace with the more powerful versions his classmates use.
Then a company offers Nico a free upgrade. The price is access to his neural activity. Mara refuses and keeps the offer in a drawer.
What does protecting a child mean when every choice comes with a cost?
Three ways of living
with the same system.
He remembers
the before.
Viktor built a life with an unaugmented mind. When work began to demand something else, he accepted the technology he had resisted. His compromise secured possibilities for Mara and left him knowing what they cost.
Resistance becomes compromise.
“I can be either
Viktor or Mara.”
For the past three years, I have worked at Umicore as an AI project manager, providing AI products for a materials science research center. Working with research data gives me practical familiarity with AI and its usefulness. The film grows from that exposure and my curiosity about what its wider adoption could mean for human lives.
I recognize Viktor’s wish to hold onto his own judgment and Mara’s willingness to adapt because the benefits are real. My audiovisual work at SBS and the short film I made during a La Guarimba residency are part of this connection between technology and making images.
The film begins inside that tension.
Before a voice speaks,
someone defines its world.
I use MiroFish to turn a written fictional world into agents that interact. The process gives me material to question, select and translate into scenes.
I write the conditions.
A history, people and institutions become a network of entities and relationships. The starting material establishes the pressures surrounding each character.
The model interprets a life.
Agents receive roles, biographies and interests. These descriptions shape their simulated voices. I examine what the translation emphasizes and what it leaves out.
Statements circulate.
Agents post, reply and share over rounds. Activity and recommendation settings help shape exposure. I follow the resulting exchanges and test changes to the starting conditions.
The recorded experiments are material for a developing film. The scenarios below are authored possibilities, not measured predictions.
A person becomes a profile.
The film moves between a life we imagine and the descriptions a system produces. These two images make that translation visible.
The family inside a system.
A simplified map for the current story. These are authored relationships, not measured influence scores.
A child described as infrastructure.
In an earlier experiment, the ChildNative entity receives the role “Bio Computational Node Operator.” The model’s translation becomes material for the film.
Change the offer.
Watch the dilemma shift.
The question is bigger than whether Mara says yes. What happens when the conditions around her change?
His mind stays private.
His options keep narrowing.
Mara protects Nico from corporate monitoring. The school system still measures him against capabilities his implant cannot provide. Refusal preserves a boundary, but does not change the world outside it.
Basic access. Fewer educational pathways.
Relief at protecting him. Fear of holding him back.
How free is a choice when its consequences are unequal?
This prototype explores possibilities written for the project. Future simulation runs, their assumptions, and the filmmaker’s interventions will form part of the developing archive.
The story.
And how it is made.
A film accompanied by an interactive archive.
The film follows the family’s emotional experience. The archive opens up the conditions behind it: the world’s rules, possible trajectories, and the decisions made while imagining their lives.
I have run an initial MiroFish experiment and retained its seed, prompt, and exported interactions. The early test uses different names and a different timeframe from the current story. Its assumptions, repeated language, and limits are material for the film as it develops.
A person becomes a profile
A visual concept combining a designed relationship map, an original MiroFish frame, and an excerpt from Branch 2036.
Explore the film’s developing formWorld and family timeline
The existing fictional chronology of technological change and inherited choices.
Working story bibleProject statement
Subject, personal connection, and the proposed relationship between form and process.
Two page draft / PDFFirst simulation experiment
The v0.4 seed, prompt, and actual exported interactions. An early test, including its limits.
Recorded development materialAudiovisual experiments
A space for future footage, sound studies, and reflections as the project develops.
In development