A few Saturdays ago, this happened. So many things could have gone wrong. This part of Atomic Vacation really pushed us to our full creative capacities. Japanese-American actress Tomi Heady did an incredible job with a really challenging script. Tomi plays Rae–the scientist/linguist charged with teaching Shizuku, the robot girl how to “be” human. After Shizuku learns of the nuclear apocalypse on Earth, she cuts off all communication, this causes an Easter Egg program to run in her–a selfie video farewell from Rae. Shizuku whose memories of Rae have been erased by her handlers tries to reconstruct her memories of her. The result is the odd fantasy/memory of a little robot girl from the future. The text for the monologues is mostly a hybrid of my own writing and appropriated text of philosophy, poetry, and science, put into a story algorithm and re-edited. In the birthday scene, Tomi speaks a piece from Gertrude Stein’s “Making of Americans,” making Stein perhaps the first poet whose work appears in VR?

Supreet Mahanti and Alex Wagner,  Depthkit expert and DP+ respectively, were incredibly professional and enthusiastic. We are now working on post-production of the scenes, but we have them. And, I can definitely say you haven’t seen anything like this–poignant and really disturbing posthuman future.