In the simulated worlds of the digital realm, time can be accelerated and decelerated, re-constructed and manipulated at will. Yet, paradoxically, these simulations are convincing and compelling because they rely on our everyday experience of time. Can time exist purely in simulation? Does the digital fundamentally alter our notion of time? Films in this screening programme speculate on such questions through the affordances of digital technology, such as computer simulations, video games, artificial intelligence, digital storage, and online meeting environments.

Shi Zheng’s Melting in Time #1 (2022) reimagines the collapse of an iceberg using decelerated computer-generated imagery, exploring the latent interplay between human, glacial, and technological time scales. On the other end of the spectrum, Bahar Noorizadeh’s Teslaism: Economics After the End of the End of the Future (2022) is an ever-accelerating racing video game. It comments on the speed of production and consumption in hyper-corporatised societies, in which the future is perpetually postponed. Emi Kusano’s Morphing Memory of Neural Fad #2 (2023) visualises the history of Tokyo street fashion through artificial intelligence, exploring the generative connections between documented and machine-generated memory. Shinji Toya’s three-part video essay Is There Beauty in Forgetting? (2015) contemplates the aesthetics of forgetting in a digital context, especially as it relates to the aggregation of digital images, data loss, and online footprints. Finally, in the collectively created work Tomorrow I Will Get Back to the World (2020), young artists from Myanmar imagine the span of a day as time elapses within a Zoom meeting.