Light Years Apart (2021 - 2025) by Christie Neptune. Interactive and Linear Single Channel film, 19:41 mins TRT.

LOGLINE

Foreground her within your field of vision.

SYNOPSIS

In Light Years Apart (2021-2025), Fula, an interdimensional being, wraps time and space to travel between parallel dimensions. The film, an interactive science fiction, investigates varying processes of ‘looking’ and ‘engagement’ within cinematic spectatorship. Utilizing biometric data and computer vision technology, the film posits multiple trajectories within a branching narrative structure, drawing a distinction and, inversely, muddying the boundaries between Fula’s interiority and a male-centered white gaze. To “see” Fula necessitates the labored process of conscious reorientation. The spectator’s gaze must pilot the narrative’s copious terrain to alter the context and organization of what is seen. This fosters an embodied awareness, a provocation in cinematic spectatorship that activates a critical lens in both real and imagined space.

AUDIENCE

Light Years Apart is optimized for screening in both linear and non-linear formats. It is intended for all audiences interested in exploring the vast capabilities of neural network technologies in immersive storytelling. The film’s interactive format includes neuroinclusive calibrations to accommodate a diversity of perspectives within two modes of screening: engagement and manual. Through calibration, viewers can choose notification font size and characters; their default position for facial recognition; and dominant eye for the interface’s eye-tracking capabilities. Light Years Apart uses an on-device machine learning API and applies subtle adversarial perturbations, including a slight blur and tint, over facial regions to balance the tradeoff between accuracy and privacy. In engagement mode, the parameters of interaction necessitate consent. For this reason, screening is limited to audience members of legal age or with parental guidance. The film’s manual mode and linear format, conversely, accommodate a greater range of diversity across all age groups, neuro-identities, and professional fields.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

In Light Years Apart (2021-2025), I contend with the history and legacy of surveillance technologies, particularly in the subjugation and continued oppression of black bodies.  What is the potential of algorithmic resistance within the infrastructures of digital surveillance, and how might the body be used as a mode of contention not only to subvert its logic, but to critique the impact and legacy of the white male gaze? Can the tools of domination be co-opted to postulate a new politics of difference? To resolve these queries, I examine the ways in which my framework resists what Black American writer and critic, Ralph Ellison, deems the “un-visible,” the hypervisible black subject devoid of humanness within systems of anti-blackness. How exactly does my film sensitise the viewer to the subjectivity and point of view of my subject, the un-visible? 

In an attempt to foster new frameworks of seeing and understanding, my film subverts the logic and function of digital surveillance. The rules and operation of my hardware were co-opted to postulate a new politics of function, a systemic reworking that centralizes the symbiotic dynamic of the body and technology in space. The camera’s lens, in this context, adds nuance to the observed and observer paradigm. As an architecture of control within the film’s discourse, the spectator orders the context and organization of what is seen on screen. Their gaze–a constellation of ideas, beliefs, gestural responses, movements, and perceptions–provides meaning to the filmic encounter in ways that I can never imagine. It forces an embodied awareness and reorients consciousness. The inner folds of my subject’s life are pinged to the viewer’s enhanced sensitization to her point of view. Within this context, the negation of the male-centered white gaze, a systemic production of hegemon and domination, is a possibility articulated by the body and technology in cinematic and real space. For me, this is important as it necessitates conscious labored work on the part of the viewer to shift the narrative. 

This film began as an artistic query inspired by the latest developments in emerging technologies. I wanted to produce an experience, on and off screen, that explored and critiqued the vast capabilities of AI and machine learning frameworks within an immersive short film that (1) considered the potential of algorithmic resistance within the cybernetics of interactive cinema, (2) interrogated the racialized gaze and (3) considered both the history and impact of anti-black surveillance. Drawing from a lineage of interactive frameworks, black literature, and systems theory, Light Years Apart highlights the quasi-symbiotic relationship between the body and technology and speaks to its potential within the matrices of collective action.

CREDIT

Light Years Apart, a film by filmmaker and Backslash Artist, Christie Neptune, starring Ronis Aba, Nia Simone, and Zipporah Wilson, was made possible with contributions from Creative Technologist and Backslash fellow, Heidi Minghao He; Choreographer, Kyle Marshall; and Director of Photography, Daniele Sarti, through production support from Backslash at Cornell Tech. The Backslash at Cornell Tech fund supports bleeding-edge technological interventions into artistic practice. It collides students, faculty, and artists–both on and off campus–providing grants for artworks, art tools, and art activities that engage the latest emerging digital technologies.

Beta testing of Light Years Apart began in 2021. The film’s official format, color grade, and sound were released in the summer of 2025.

LINKS

1. Screen web-based format online [HERE]

2. Download Light Years Apart (2021-2025) Film Dossier [HERE]

3. View IMDb Film Profile [HERE]