Godfrey Reggio on AI and the Singularity: We Are in the Cyborg State!

Godfrey Reggio is an inventor of a film style which creates poetic images of extraordinary emotional impact for audiences worldwide. Reggio is prominent in the film world for his Qatsi trilogy – Koyaanisqatsi: Live Out of Ballance, Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation, and Naqoyqatsi: Life as War, essays of visual images and sound which chronicle the destructive impact of the modern world on the environment. Thanks to my friend Tom Lowe, I was very fortunate to attend the premiere of Godfrey’s latest film – Visitors. In my view Visitors is one of those fundamentally important films that one simply has to watch. If you are fortunate enough to see the film the way I did – in glorious 4k and accompanied by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra live performance of Philip Glass’ original music score, then I guarantee it will be a movie experience like no other. And chances are that it will touch and move your heart even if it doesn’t do so for your head. I would also suggest that you must go and watch at least Reggio’s first film – Koyaanisqatsi. [If you can also see Visitors it will be even better.] Otherwise it is unlikely you will get many of the references we are discussing during the interview. At any rate, during our 1 hour conversation with Godrey Reggio we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: why he is a refugee from another period who had the opportunity to live in the middle ages; the guiding principle behind his life and work; why and how he got interested in film-making; his Qatsi trilogy as another way of seeing the world and how it was adopted by popular culture such as MTV; Visitors and shooting both 4k and Black-and-White; the evolution of Reggio’s ideas and his take on the technological singularity… My most favorite quote that I will take away from this interview with Godfrey Reggio is: “It’s our behavior that determines the content of our mind. […] We become what we do; we become what we see; we become the routine that we are a part of…”