THE END

There’s rattling and crackling. We hear the whir of a projector, the clicking of old cameras. The room is in flux, fragments intertwine, curtains slide open and reveal ever-changing views of the filmmaking equipment and the cinema space – or is it the projection booth? Where is the audience? Shadow plays reminiscent of film noir instantly dissolve and morph into seemingly lifelike silhouettes. And finally, the audience appears. But instead of staring at the screen, they gaze, spellbound, into their VR headsets. The movie theatre seems like a relic from the future: familiar yet uncanny.

The End creates an ironic, dystopian vision of the future of cinema. In a ten-minute virtual hallucination, Claudia Larcher unfolds a world between cinematic nostalgia and a speculative AI future. Cameras grow out of transhumanist bodies, classic velvet curtains mutate into moving, virtual surfaces. The room and the screen have become one. Perhaps this has been long foreseeable: life is both backdrop and screen; our smartphones have replaced movie equipment. Even today, people are gradually abandoning the cinema space, and replacing it with social media and streaming platforms. Will cinema still be relevant for the cyborgs of the future? Or will this collective, discursive space have long since become disembodied and obsolete?

An AI-generated cloud rap collage, with lyrics scripted by Claudia Larcher in collaboration with ChatGPT, anticipates The End. Is this the end of cinema? No applause, no life, no pain. Whether we should be afraid or not remains an open question. The Ewo Taauw Tean. (Eva Fischer)