Philipp Schmerheim

The Israeli short film »Sight« (May-raz/Lazo 2012) is set in a near future that has successfully merged augmented reality (AR) with virtual reality (VR) through a retina-implant system called »Sight«, in the service of a dubiously optimized lifestyle. The film introduces its protagonist Patrick’s daily routine – VR skydiving on the living room carpet, breakfast cucumber cutting using a cutting accuracy measurement AR game, watching TV on a blank wall serving as the screen for his retina projections. Later, Patrick attends a blind date with Daphne, another Sight user. Both stumble through the date relying on simultaneous retina impositions of the other’s social media profiles, but Patrick has a secret advantage: guided by the interactive dating app »Wingman« that relies on facial recognition and social media profile analysis, he is able to draw the initially reluctant Daphne’s into his apartment where, however, she ultimately discovers the Wingman app. Before she can leave, Patrick accesses her neural database and reprograms her.

»Sight« exposes an inconvenient truth about contemporary digital imagery: its ontological value does not derive anymore from the objectivity of the "impassive lens" (Bazin) but rather from its implementability in and augmentation through the ever-growing global database that transforms everything we believe to know about the world into code. The Real of digital film thus is degraded to a stepping-stone on the path to an entirely new kind of ontological truth. Via case studies of »Sight« and the British TV series »Black Mirror«, my presentation will explore this assumption.

Philipp Schmerheim is a film philosopher and children’s media scholar working as a university lecturer at the German Studies Department of the University of Bremen. In his most recent book »Skepticism Films. Knowing and Doubting the World in Contemporary Cinema« (Bloomsbury, 2015) he explores the ways in which so-called skepticism films reflect on our ways of knowing and not knowing the world by varying philosophical skepticist thought experiments, allowing insights into the fundamental relation between film and philosophy.

He is the co-founder and editor in charge of KinderundJugendmedien.de, an interdisciplinary website for children’s media research, and has co-authored »Kinder- und Jugendfilmanalyse« (UTB, 2013). He completed his PhD at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis of the University of Amsterdam, where he also obtained an MA in Film Studies. Prior to that, he studied philosophy, media and communication studies, and ancient history in Göttingen, Rome, and Santa Barbara (CA).