Singularity started as a zombie film but evolved into a movie-graphic novel-essay on alterity – “the quality or state of being radically alien to a particular cultural orientation”¹. During the project, I read loads about transhumanism², which was why my zombies turned out not to be zombies at all.
I was curious about what might trigger a biological change in humans to transform into posthumans – transhumanists define posthumans as those “whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards”³. What could posthumans do that we can’t? Given our ongoing technological advances, I imagined nanobots that get inside us and create ways of being connected to one another constantly.
I also wondered what it would be like to go through that transformation and this is where the zombie-like appearance comes in; I imagined the body shutting down to some extent whilst undergoing the transformation. I think it’s impossible to make a film about otherness without it relating to contextual stories in some way, and this film has a point to make for anyone who has felt ‘other’ for whatever reason (skin colour, sexuality, accent, sex, health, finances, ability, marital status, for example – the list could be exhaustive). Singularity was screened for two weeks during the University of Brighton Graduate Show in June 2015. You can watch the film here.
¹ Definition taken from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alterity 7 Dec 2017
²You can find out more about transhumanism here.
³Can’t remember where this quote came from now. Sorry. Probably Nick Bostrom.
