Third Nature

Combining the elements of documentary, science fiction and essay film, Third Nature addresses algorithms (machines) as a species, and the virtual as its habitat. It is shot entirely in a virtual environment of video games and set in the space where the boundaries between organic, cultural and technical are obfuscated. It explores virtual nature as a new frontier to discover and colonise and algorithms as species that populate it.

Algorithms are involved in every field of our life, affecting its social, political, economic aspects, even though we don’t always understand what they do and how they operate. Today the status of algorithms is changing and their definition is challenged. An algorithm is no longer a tool to accomplish a task, or a set of instructions, it has its own agency. Algorithms are used to predict the future and to recreate the past, through prediction systems and virtual simulations and reconstructions. Algorithms guide our actions, reflect back human nature, analyse, trade, calculate, run, explore, perform, evaluate, transform, produce, wander, play, study, classify.

The film is an exploration of this environment, it is an attempt to represent the underrepresented, through fiction and speculation. The combination of the virtual environment, its resonance in the physical world and its material infrastructure, become Third Nature, where the boundaries between fiction and reality, material and immaterial, past and future, physical and virtual are obfuscated.