Chicago-based filmmaker Calum Walter has produced one of the most beguiling films of the past year, the experimental techno-thriller Meridian (2019). Rather Farocki-like in its approach, Meridian presents edited footage from a set of automated sea drones designed to send a vaccine from one place to another. Several of the machines malfunction, producing unexpected night footage of waters unsuitable for a drone: fields of lily pads, major thoroughfares for large crafts, etc. But Walter’s film actually displays the surveillance function of such robots as they traverse the dark of night under the cover of a humanitarian mission.
Partly a sumptuous nightscape, Meridian is also a sort of dystopian flipside of Snow’s La région centrale (1971), as the placid beauty of the visual field is abruptly truncated by a robotic camera manoeuvre controlled by “no one.” Partly influenced by the work of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, Meridian shows us the way that we have been watched for quite some time, but it also suggests a possible future for the avant-garde, an experimental cinema generated by algorithmic impulse and robotic arm. Walter has produced a film that shows us exactly the crossroads at which we find ourselves: art infused with a humanistic spirit, or with something else as yet undefined. - Michael Sicinski, Cinemascope
Meridian (2019) follows the last unit in a fleet of autonomous machines sent to deliver an emergency vaccine. The film shows footage transmitted by the machine before its disappearance, tracing a path that seems to stray further and further from its objective.
Meridian is inspired by an event that occurred in Washington, DC on July 17, 2017, where an automated security robot from the company Knightscope was found floating in a fountain at the building it patrolled. It had plunged into the water while on a routine patrol, spurring speculation about whether the machine had chosen to end its life or if this was just a glitch in an otherwise reliable new technology. Perhaps more interesting than the fate of the machine, was the desire to see its death within a human context.
Screenings:
Berlinale - Forum Expanded
Antimatter, Victoria, British Columbia
Sundance - New Frontiers
Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival
Ann Arbor Film Festival - Unseen Migrations - Special Screening (canceled due to covid)
Short Shadows, EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
San Diego Underground Film Festival
Marienbad Film Festival, Mariánské Lázné, Czech Republic
Unseen Film Festival, Denver, Colorado
Athens Film and Video Festival
Crossroads Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque/SF MoMA
Melanie Flood Projects, Portland OR
Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente de La Plata, Argentina
Static Vision - Cursed Signal, Melbourne Australia