New Acid
Basim Magdy, France, Switzerland, 2019o
Several animals chat via text messages. Between mundane exchanges of words, rivalries emerge. Have they become human?
“Do you remember life before plastic plants and origami flowers?”. Basim Magdy’s latest short imagines a nostalgia-tinged reality, a time on earth after humans, where animals and bots communicate through emoji-filled text messages. The zany language they speak might lead us astray, but we can detect a certain yearning for interaction. Enlightened through sleep deprivation, these beings find themselves trapped − but where? In a zoo or a stream of data?
Julian Ross