Keyword Artificial Life

Comprehensive survey of robotics filmed in the leading labs of the world (primarily the United States and Japan) and featuring experts such as Rodney Brooks of MIT and William “Red” Whittaker of Carnegie Mellon University. Incorporates pop culture robots with the less glamorous real world and delves into the ultimate issues of what constitutes life and whether consciousness is a product of intelligence.

An homage to a lost horror film starring Lon Chaney, A Blind Bargain is inspired by a handful of remaining old photographs and newspaper reviews. This version is set in 1970 but commits to the same sense of dread and catastrophe as the original story about a young man who allows a psychotic doctor to experiment on his mother.