Observe these cats playing with robot vacuums. Calmly sitting on top, they allow themselves to be carried around the apartment at random. They have fun with robots that seem, strangely, to resemble living beings. What hidden link, what strange kinship connects machines and cats? Perhaps machines and cats have always had a secret life, one that humans do not understand, a kind of autonomy that escapes comprehension?
Samuel Butler is trying to understand why machines have multiplied in Erewhon, since machines were forbidden during his first trip to the city one hundred and fifty years ago. When he discovered Erewhon in 1872, he was struck by the complete absence of machines. Erewhonians were aware of their existence, but didn't use any. They had destroyed them a few centuries earlier, convinced that machines had a life of their own, life in a broader sense of the term. Machines clearly don't resemble animals. Nor do they have human consciousness. This is the error we commonly make in reducing life to the forms and kingdoms we are familiar with - plant, animal, human. This error prevents us from recognizing autonomy, which is the life specific to machines. Erewhon formed itself behind screens, and Butler speaks once more. From the depths of a data center, he explores images of the city found on the highways of the Internet. He continues his exploration, trying to understand how neotenes age, how they care for their children (if they have any), their conception of pleasure, how the machines care for them, feed them, etc.
We are exploring a city that produces itself behind screens: in the advertisements for our technological devices, the videos employees record in call centers, the ones we share when we watch cats playing with vacuum cleaners. It's a city where machines are responsible for work, and take care of humans. An engineer's dream, in which we all participate by watching these videos, and pushing them to the top of platform playlists. We're not trying to imagine the future. We are exploring a particular form of our imagination. We are documenting early twenty-first century fantasies of automation. This city exists, but it can't be located at a specific point on the Earth's surface, whose geographic coordinates can be clearly identified. It is made up of images circulating on the Internet. Its existence consists of being diffracted within the network. We are documenting a city that exists today behind our screens. We have not produced any of the images ourselves. We borrow and arrange based on images found on the network. The film's chapters consist entirely of shots taken from the Internet, of "found footage."