Guest
On the second day after the city’s central data center unexpectedly crashes and reboots, the server keeper meets the cloud system in a disordered digital world where they become a passenger and a woman who is a retired taxi driver. They drive through the city, get lost, and try to locate themselves. Meanwhile, they also recall the ocean that covered this continent hundreds of millions of years ago, with a shell fossil that can track ancient memories and a pulsar star that guides the direction in the depths of the universe, as if they’re traveling and entering fragments of memories stored in the Cloud, or a wider version of themselves. Finally, they reach the end of the road and find themselves in another memory of a stone beach that is going to sink under the water soon after the hydropower station dam is built. Gradually, they also recall each other’s forgotten memories, like they were not really strangers. In computer, random access is one of the modes to read and write datum ( as in random access memory, RAM), by which any arbitrary address can be visited in equal time no matter where it is located. It also refers to how we process memory, especially in the time interwoven deeply with digital technology. As a speculative hypothesis of the experience in the Cloud world, the film is, however, not a futuristic imagination. It’s set in real locations of the so-called Chinese data capital, Guiyang, a mountainous and cloudy city, where many big data infrastructures locate, including the first iCloud data center in Asia and the host of the FAST telescope. They have changed the lives of people who are living here thoroughly in the recent decade. In this respect, the film is about changes, also about lost and found. While ranging time and space, from the past to the future, from underground to the universe, it attempts to examine what is under going in the background of current digital cities.
