Unwilling Suspension of Disbelief

I know the black cat was not there. I know you weren’t there either. This is a love letter to realness in the times of everything virtual. Like virtual production.

- Chinki Sinha

"Beyond good and evil/the sky/is blue" -Abbas Kiarostami

"And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream" -Federico Fellini

There are those big promises. Immortality, elsewheres and the fantasia of multi-levelled virtual heterotopias, which are multiple time and places connected and differentiated. Read body scanners, LED walls, virtual and augmented reality.

Nothing is real though. At least in terms of tangibility. The forest, the desert, the river, the world, too. Many worlds can be created out of this one. If time is distance, virtual production has collapsed time itself. It offers salvation and solutions. You can be anywhere and everywhere. It is called hyperreality, a state of human consciousness that can no longer differentiate between real and the simulation of the real. This is where fact and fiction are fused.

This is how films came into being. The viewers have been urged to lose their grip on reality.

The technology that powers all of this is called Unreal Engine, a real-time 3D creation tool “for photoreal visuals and immersive experiences”.

Then, there are the Volume Walls, which project live backgrounds and enable live-action production. These are massive walls. Everything can be altered by a few computer commands. You can be teleported anywhere. A black cat from anywhere can be placed on a bridge. A cloud can be fit. You can make rain. The possibilities are immense. Everything is possible.

This is the future. It is already here.

Al technology has made life easier and wars more sophisticated. But it has also made us more isolated from people and places.

They ask me to willingly suspend my disbelief. This means you believe the unbelievable for the duration of the story.