- dir. IARA LEE
- year. 1995
- country. USA
- run-time. 83 MINS
- rating. PG
£6 / £4.50 CONC.
Is reality obsolete?
From low-tech function like body piercing and artificially-stocked fishing pools, to the latest in bionics and VR gaming, Iara Lee's cyber-age intellectual survey—call it a *.DOCumentary—downloads a Future Shockful of data and defines the parameters of advanced technologies that delete nature and reprogram mankind. Cryonics defy death; the Internet exists outside time and space; smart drugs and surgery upgrade the mind and body. But are we headed toward human optimization or system crash?
Timothy Leary, RU Sirius, Lisa Palac, John Barlow, and others offer sound bytes against a mesmerizing screen display of cutting-edge computer graphics (for the 1990s) and archival clips. Exhilarating and disturbing, Synthetic Pleasures raises issues that still today nobody can afford to abort / retry / ignore. Conceived as an electronic road movie, Synthetic Pleasures, directed by Iara Lee and produced by George Gund, investigates cutting-edge technologies and their influences on our culture. It explores the idea that mankind's effort to tap the power of nature has been so successful that a new world is suddenly emerging, an artificial reality, a supernature.
The film presents the implications of having access to such power as we all scramble to inhabit our latest science fictions. Synthetic Pleasures is set to be the cult movie of the '90s.