“The ideal of truth is the deepest fiction,” claimed F. Nietzsche, adding that “truth is an illusion whose illusory nature has been forgotten.”

What is real today? This is the fundamental question that begins Adele Tulli's intriguing journey. R E A L proceeds by connecting situations across different scales, where humans interacting in digital and virtual environments alternate with scenes from the network's infrastructure, grounding us again in the physical reality we inhabit. The film was shot in various countries, in both physical and virtual settings: in Greece on a cable-laying ship; in Portugal inside a data center; in Sweden in a fiber-optic cable factory; in Busan, South Korea, with a family living in a Smart Village, and in Seoul with a rider and YouTuber; in Germany with patients and medical staff at a clinic specializing in internet addiction disorders; with a woman working on an adult dating platform; in Venice, where a street artist resembling an alien works as a living statue while thousands of tourists take selfies with him; on the Tuscan coast, where a robot dog collects environmental data; in Rimini during the annual convention of social media marketers and digital entrepreneurs; inside a virtual reality platform with a queer couple sharing various experiences, from meeting friends to attending a VR party.

It all begins with Bixby, a robot being questioned by a child… who repeatedly asks if he is beautiful. Reflections on Zoom platforms, and virtual reality becoming essential, especially in a world that is far from kind. Meanwhile, in Busan, there are 50 Eco Delta apartments occupied by families who pay nothing in exchange for participating in a Big Brother-style experiment where the focus is on their interaction with artificial intelligence. From the porn menu of a girl cashing in with her videos to the confessions of young people overwhelmed by anxiety and depression, many declare that they are nothing without their followers. Some are stripped of the social authority they gained on social media as they undergo detox treatment to break the vicious cycle of dependency: rebuilding social relationships with real people becomes the only way to feel human again.

“Virtual reality is so real that the people you meet are exactly as you knew them,” says the queer couple within the virtual reality platform, prompting reflection; perhaps Nietzsche was right when he said that “the ideal of truth is the deepest fiction,” which today could be rephrased as: the ideal of the real is the most virtual virtual…

The concept of solitude is the recurring theme in Tulli's sophisticated work: the Minotaur wandering through the labyrinth is its most evident mythological metaphor, as the network is today’s labyrinth, with its pathologies, alienation, isolation, but also freedom from the body’s physical limits.

A visionary and poetic cinematography accompanies images constructed like a visual art installation, attempting to restore physicality to a parallel digital multiverse. Between the physics of oxygen and carbon and the logic of bits, the algorithm reigns supreme. A documentary that challenges our understanding of a world in which it is increasingly difficult to feel human, physical, real: amid headsets, webcams, smartphones, surveillance cameras, mechanical and virtual gazes that recount a new way of experiencing the real.

“The virtual world is taking over, redefining everything before we have a chance to reflect and decide,” claims Shoshana Zuboff; “we now find ourselves immersed in a digital present where some of the fundamental categories we used to define the world are disappearing, such as the boundaries between physical and virtual experiences, between the public and private spheres, between the concepts of true and false, as well as between a body and its digital simulations. Fundamentally, what is no longer so obvious is the very perception of what is real,” emphasizes the director.

A careful documentation seeks to convey the emotional, social, and cognitive metamorphoses already underway; digital technologies hyperconnect our alienations, resulting in one single outcome: to destabilize, hallucinate, and hypnotize the restless individual solitude.

04-Nov-2024 by Beatrice