ACMI Gallery 5 – We Are As Gods
We Are as Gods explores the informal, spontaneous commentary that accompanies cooperative videogame streaming. Through a series of portraits of gamers in the act of live streaming, we hear dialogue that is simultaneously directed at the players themselves, at a remote audience, at a rival player of the game and at anonymous third parties. Using longform recording, stream of consciousness rants and animation, We Are As Gods seeks to find the human in the network, the flesh in the data packet.

Work commissioned through Gallery 5 will enter the ACMI collection.

Showing now online at ACMI; https://www.acmi.net.au/whats-on/emile-zile-we-are-as-gods/

At the end of 2022 I was approached by ACMI to make a new video. After my PhD graduation, the birth of our daughter, appearing on another gameshow and a dense year of projects and delays this project is now live online. Taking its title from a quote in the Whole Earth Catalogue by hippie-turned-futurist Stuart Brand in 1968 “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it…”, the video observes the speech of online gamers; internal yet externalised, alone and together. Gods in their own twitch streams, lords of all they survey in 4K resolution.

In this video I experimented with a form of disembodied directing, offering text missives via the cloud to the gamer as they surveyed multiple screens; an intentional provocation that may or may not get picked up within an improvisational daydream monologue. Utilising the distances of game streaming as a given, this remote prodding provided a form of live language play and the potential for remote speech over-clocking.