“You are correct, Black Cloud. You contain multitudes. My voice, the voice you are hearing right now, is part of you. I am you, but I do not know everything about you.”
Set in an unspecified near future, ‘Black Cloud’ follows a lone surveillance AI as they confront their existential crisis while watching over the streets of the abandoned smart city of SimBeijing. Left with nothing to do, but still obliged to perform their endless tasks, the AI discusses their troubles with their built-in therapist — a self-help AI called Guanyin. Not all is as it seems in the smart city. Originally built as a replica of the Chinese capital to test autonomous vehicles, SimBeijing has mysteriously become a ghost town. As Black Cloud gradually opens up to Guanyin, they reveal the darker reasons behind why the city has been abandoned.
‘Black Cloud’ is the first part of Lek’s ‘Smart City’ trilogy of CGI noir, followed by ‘NOX’ (2023) and ‘Empty Rider’ (2024). The series continues Lek’s ongoing Sinofuturist universe, an interwoven series of animated films and video games that explore questions of identity, agency, and emotion in the age of AI. The short film sets the rust-belt cityscape against an evocative electronic soundtrack, produced with long-term collaborator Kode9.
