If humans are fire, thoughts are light, and behaviors and language are shadows, then Leonardo da Vinci is the shadow of the shadow. The work takes the protagonist and Leonardo da Vinci as clues, telling the story of people's prosperous life on the "cloud", the emergence of latent crisis, and the connection of digital subjects in the context of decentralization in the near future. The film extensively uses AIGC as material, weaving the Renaissance and web 3.0 into the same narrative, in order to reflect the disillusionment of people's power at the bottom of the different social processes, and the future imagination of linear shackles under the futuristic perspective of technology. Will technology become a new kind of theological oppression? How can we imagine an alternative future?

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When we think about Leonardo da Vinci's transcendence and the context of his time (the Renaissance), we find some structural similarities with the modern era behind it, including Leonardo da Vinci's questions about people's rights and humanity's emancipation as a representative of the Renaissance, questions of knowledge and rights, questions of technology and class, and in the atmosphere of neoliberalism and technological futurism, it seems that everything will steadily move forward , technology would develop, and everyone would receive the dividends of the times. In the secularized contemporary era, our conviction in technological rationality has become a universal state, as in the medieval period from people's belief in the one and only God. In Foucault's case, this is an intellectual shifting. At the same time, there are many contemporary discussions of technological developments that question this single truth-like techno-futurist/the Californian ideology perspective. For example, there is a discussion of platform capitalism, where personal data becomes a new material of production. We are thinking about the legacy of old systems and old power structures underneath the technology. there are countless capital bets behind the rise of Chatgpt, and behind the tools are the companies. And whether the tech companies of Silicon Valley and the giants of Wall Street, who seem to have the power to interpret scripture in this age, will become a new kind of ecclesiastical authority and theological oppression. Imperialism is no more, while empire endures. The power of capital has become more secretive. And this increasingly hidden system of power is the undercurrent of our short film in an age of high technological development. As in the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci possesses an enlightenment about the humanism of the age, a renewed concern for the rights of the individual citizen as a human being.

 

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Our subject matter is science fictional and futuristic, but projects very much a stubborn reality, very much an unchanging structural trauma, a circular history.