2019 is a documentary about 2019 made in 2019 by the students of the Master in Net Art and Digital Cultures, Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara. The video is based on chapter “2019” from Ray Kurzweil’s book “The Age of Spiritual Machines” (1999), an attempt to predict the future in detail, decade after decade.

The eerie quality of this text depends upon the fact that it is, not differently from our current 2019, the output of the way the future (our present) was predicted and designed at the end of the last century; as such, it’s very similar, yet very different from our current 2019. It’s the output of imagination, without the recombinant effect of reality. It’s a prediction, but the use of the present form makes it sound like the description of an actual development, along a different time line. 

The chapter text has been edited by the students of the “Interactive Systems” class of the Master Degree in Net Art and Digital Cultures, Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara, in order to be turned into the narrative text of a video essay about 2019. Very little changes have been made, actually – mostly in the effort to recover to the chapter text some nice stories featured in the following dialogue.

Contributors: Simone Cisarni, Naeim Ghomorlou & Faezeh Heydari Sabet, Noemi Granchi & Giulia Fraschi, Sofia Grassi, Feng Hanyu, Chen Lizi, Daniela Marzano, Rebecca Nerini, Andrea Pedrazzi, Yuan Qinqin, Gu Yu, Chen Yue, Sun Wen Jing

The script can be read, downloaded and used to generate other versions of “2019” here.