Synopsis

Director's Comment

DECIMATE is a sequel to the previous work 404. While the predecessor illuminated a system mining emotions as data resources, DECIMATE records an individual dissolving within an inescapable structure, captured through the gaze of a system operating with complete indifference. The work portrays an individual who believes in digitalization as a new form of life. In a society where individualism has become entrenched, the gaze shifts from physical reality toward virtual surrogate structures. We swim through screens to connect, yet we are merely exhibiting our solitude within a transparent aquarium designed by the system. The virtual idol 'Godo' appearing in the film is both an unfulfillable hope and a platform device that extracts human emotion as data. The protagonist, attempting "self-mind uploading," ends up fragmented, unable to settle in either reality or the virtual void. Real-world inequalities are replicated seamlessly online; there is no outside to escape to. Both the abandoned body and the floating consciousness are reduced to assets—consumables of the system.

Staff

Producer/Scenario/Storyboard/Character Design/BG Design/Lay Out/Animation/Effect/Editing 

JEONG Kahee

Sound/Music ISHIKI Takeru

Voice AI

Other GRAYCODE, jiiiiin

Program Note

As a whole, the film casts a cold, unflinching gaze on the severe isolation and alienation bred by near-future technological capitalism. For its protagonist, Bagi, the virtual idol Godo is his sole salvation — his entire world. Rather than a dazzling future, this film fixes its eyes on a quiet, chilling loneliness, laying the salvation technology promises directly over the emptiness lurking beneath it, right in front of us today. In the end, through a subject reduced to a tragic remnant belonging to neither reality nor the virtual, the film sharply captures the portrait of a fragmented human being within a brutal class society.

SONG Sihyung