The Golden Age: Somewhere by Paul Nicholls

In this movie by Paul Nicholls of architectural animation studio Factory Fifteen, the world is conceptualised as a series of virtual interfaces, where people visit places and meet each other without leaving the room. Going to a party? You’ll need the IP address. Want to go to the park? Just download a template and build it.

Called Somewhere, the film is the follow-up to Nicholls’ award-winning movie The Simulation. You can see all the movies we’ve featured by Factory Fifteen here.

Here’s some information from Factory Fifteen:

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Golden Age – Somewhere

Within ‘Somewhere’ we are transported to a time where the boundaries between what is real and what is simulated are blurred. We live online and download places to relax, parks and shopping malls. We can even interact with our friends as if they were in the same room with simulated tele-presence. Everyone is connected and immersed in nanorobotic replications of any kind of object or furnishings, downloadable on credit based systems. Distance and time become as alien as the ‘offline’ The local becomes the global and the global becomes the local. Consumer based capitalism has changed forever. A truly ‘glocolised’ world. The singularity is near.

The film places us into this vision, observing an average inhabitant within the ever changing environment of the latest SimuHouse. From a painting to a park and from a telephone call to a shopping mall. That is until there is a leek in the system and everything malfunctions. The film concludes with the house being forced to reset, giving the character and viewer a stark reminder that nothing is ‘real’ even her dog, which re-materializes in front of her.