Kakia Konstantinaki: Brains in the state of suspension

The project is a live-performed CGI short film that uses non-linear narratives and elements of the horror genre to explore human intelligence and how it uses tools of imposition and domination in order to exist.

In a world free of humans, brains wake up from cryogenic sleep and search for new bodies. In the absence of human bodies, they start possessing inanimate objects. After dominating everything, they notice that their fixation on control has led them to create monstrous entities. In a moment of irony, the brains realize that, to defend themselves against the monsters, they must in effect destroy themselves. Their own intelligence is the monster and must be terminated.

What would it mean if we used our intelligence differently, and “did not treat everything around us as a prop to our own drama”, as James Bridle notes?

The story is a commentary on the domination of human intelligence, reason, and patriarchy. The metaphor of the brain, with its relentless drive to dominate, reflects humanity’s willingness to destroy even itself in order to exist. The work, though not a typical horror film, draws from the genre’s exploration of the liminal and the in-between. “Cosmic horror writers are less interested in shocking you than with the boundary between the natural and the supernatural” – Eugene Thacker. The film seeks to explore the threshold, the hybrid, the never-acquired condition, the endless drive to reach the desired object, which always leads to another liminality that never satisfies. A monster that the human never seems willing to accept. “The monster always represents the destruction of boundaries and so we need monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our monstrosities” – Jack Halberstam.

The story is told through fragmented, non-linear forms that reproduce feminine narrative structures and challenge traditional, climactic, linear ones. This project will explore methods of film presentation, as an experiment on filmmaking and the cinematic experience. It will be presented as a multi-channel projection installation proposed as a live experience, a film that has at least one live element, be it the music, the voiceover, or a selection of scenes.