A Stranger Quest

“I met David through his website. He created a huge archive of maps and curated it like a poet organizing his verses: every map was a piece of an endless work of art. Nobody recognized it as such. I found it to be a metaphor for someone who, even in the age of satellites, still has his Pillars of Hercules to cross. When we met, some months later, I saw a man of almost 80 years who still had the passion, curiosity, and energy of a child, always making new projects, new friends, and constantly acquiring new maps. His quest became so evidently stranger than just a collector’s obsession, and it seemed to me like a perfect example of the quest for the meaning of life and existence and a very peculiar strategy of transcendence. I discovered that he had already built a copy of his world on Second Life, a map center at the University of Stanford, and many facilities for maps and mapping. He was a man full of tender poetry, full of gentleness.

I thought it could be amazing to try to analyze such a big, pointless effort through the eyes of artificial intelligence, so I asked ChatGPT to ask me some questions about human existence. Then I made a film where this AI followed David around, trying to understand the beauty of the conquest of the useless.”

Andrea Gatopoulos