Did I ever tell you I played a robot in an experimental science-fiction film?

Well, I did. Arrive Maris In Ronde is the thesis project of dear friend and superlative artist Rebecca Carlisle-Healy, sometimes known as RGB by RCH.

I play LITHa (Living, Imagining, Transformative Human Analogue), a machine intelligence brought to life over the course of an interplanetary journey to Mars. Originally programmed by humans and created as a tool for planetary colonization, she has the intellectual capacity to see that her given directives are faulty, and the computing power to imagine better alternatives. As physical life, the play of body in space, overtakes her sensory input, her computer brain forms a bond with Mars that causes her to develop so rapidly that she is lost to the control of the human pilot, Clay (played by Judah Switzer). She begins to advance independently, discovering the nature of consciousness. This is essentially a hopeful vision of the Technological Singularity.

As for the film’s strange visual quality, RCH wrote in her original proposal:

In general, every scene that appears on screen will be a composite image, a series of nested shots. This system of image-units will…communicate more information than can be contained by untreated, live video. The outermost frame establishes the scene’s location, a middle frame acts as an extension of the actor, who lies in the center. This progression is imitative of the way the human eye sees, with its distribution of rods and cones: fine, color detail in the center of the field of vision, where the cones are the most dense, followed by a large intermediary zone in which the brain generalizes and creates patterns, finally enclosed by the rods, which are very good at detecting motion and changes in light and dark…The surrounding frames provide a make-believe, but rational, context for the actor in the middle, but the effect is emotionally isolating. As all other players in the story, she [LITHa] is somehow alienated from her surroundings, unable to touch and be touched.

Rebecca’s image manipulations, language poems, and signature gif grain textures can be found online here, here, here, and here.