Latitude – A feature film about our fascination with technology1

Over the past few months I have been working on a project, with a number of friends, students and colleagues, to create a feature film about technology.

The film, called Latitude, follows two technology addicts who discover, through a hobby known as Geocaching, a secret that sends them on a journey to California to uncover the ultimate technology. Here’s a bit more about the film here:

The film will ask important questions about our contemporary fascination with technology. In many ways it will be a metaphor for examining themes such as technological fetishism and the Church of Apple, freedom and the web as well as surveillance and open culture. We are currently exploring innovative ways to shoot and distribute the film, actively using the analogue and digital technologies that the theme of the film will be dealing with. We are also planning for the film to be accessible and experienced in new ways: such as through the activity of Geocaching and other geo-locative modes. We also plan to fragment the film up and hide it across the web.

It’s an exciting project for me as it will be a culmination of a number of ideas that I have been working on over the past few years and it is great to be working on it with students from the course that I teach on. Everyone is taking a real risk with doing this; so it’s exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. But isn’t that what University is all about?