Don’t Call It A Comeback

I did this one little job a while back for my friend Carolina Cabal. She grew up in Colombia, trained at Parsons, Columbia, and ESDI in Barcelona, and she now works for Rachel Roy.

In Which I Yearn To Enter A Simulated World Of Perfect Style

Recently, I watched the film Welt am Draht, or World on a Wire. It’s like four hours long, a made-for-German-television mini-series from 1973 that sprang from the mind of one Rainer Werner Fassbinder. (He was adapting a sci-fi novel.) The film concerns a computer scientist who works for a private institute that receives some state funds for its experimental programs involving simulated worlds. First we learn that there’s a world-within-a-world, which is controlled by the institute’s huge, blinking mainframe and populated by 10,000 “identity units” programmed to believe themselves and their world to be real. (One, the so-called Einstein unit, exists with the knowledge that all is part of a simulation, and is tortured by his awareness of the world above.) Slowly, over the course of the movie, the computer scientist comes to suspect that the world he perceives as reality is a simulation from above in itself. That is, unless he’s simply losing his mind.