Synthetic Pleasures (1995) User Reviews

Ahead of its time - a trip worth taking

[greg-253 · 8 December 2001]

If you're looking for some supreme eye candy with a little futurism - this is the movie for you. Iara Lee lets the subjects speak for themselves as she probes the outer rim of future consciousness. Begins with the hyperreality of Japanese recreational parks - and ends exploring the concept of digital soul capture via brain scan. Curious about cryogenics? Cyber-sex? A.I.? This film addresses them all - with a peppering of experts, artists and kooks. Some excellent ambient mixes provide the soundtrack....

Horrendously alarming in its summation of our tech culture.

[jcharlesberry · 18 January 2002]

Whether concerning morphing one's body or immediate environment through climate control and/or fabrication, this film is extremely disturbing to a true humanist such as myself. The term transhumanist is IMO an oxymoron. Iara Lee's frightening film wakes out of slumber the real person. The one line from Howard Rheingold (one of my fav VR theorists) that summarises the whole movie is, "if the power goes off (one day) then we'll all wake up and see the hell we live in." (par.) Has a diverse cast, including VR pioneer Jaron Lanier.

I rented this together with Machine Dreams, a film solely about machines, AI, and the supposed coming merging of flesh and silicon that quotes people like Marvin Minsky and a former NASA director. Both these films show the danger to "meat," or our flesh. Jaron Lanier recently raised this problem with his One-half a Manifesto on Edge.org, where he terms the simplification of the human being by "cybernetic totalists" (as he puts it ), who use the human as machine metaphor.

This is the battle of The Matrix versus art, poetry, music, nature - right now.