The World of It's Always Been You!

“In our lived experience (especially now when the hyper-connected world presents a perpetual loop of our own thoughts and opinions fed back to us), anywhere we go, there we are. Anything we hear about, there we are, our own voice speaking back to us. Outside of all that, which feels increasingly distant, another world opens up to us. For ‘It’s Always Been You!’, we’re searching for what lies beyond, outside of ourselves, within others, within and without the world. The film exists in these three movements; the aetherial, the material and the digital.”

“The other ‘element’ we were living in, of course, was in cyberspace; a world not so different from our own because it, and all of its inhabitants, were a reflection of our own, and yet somehow inhuman. In a way, it feels so obvious, it’s so close to us we barely notice. It’s a world where the living create proxies for themselves and the dead don’t die, they merely assimilate into this mass digital tableau. It felt proper that the film drive toward this place. Rather than move through the narrative, the film descends through the portrait of this ‘now’ until we land, ultimately, in a digitized, artificial world.

It’s alive all around us at every moment and yet it can’t be seen or touched. It’s how our ancestors felt as they looked at the world around them, at the night sky, at the deep oceans. They saw an unknowable and untouchable world of Gods, of angels and demons, of spirits of the dead still looking on upon them from beyond the grave; and they imagined a great tapestry of which we are all a detail. The here and now holds meaning and importance, but the real forces that control our world must have felt somewhere else, invisible. The idea that we’ve recreated this for ourselves today, a netherverse of pixels and coding language where the fates and tempests of our collective consciousness reside, is of special interest to the film overall. “

“In the end the film is this kaleidoscope of past and future, of material and thought-form, no idea felt too out of reach not to take its place in the collage. It’s a series of snapshots on a hot day as everyone boils over. Each voice, the streets, the car horns, those pigeons, the wind through the park, those planes flying overhead, all are a piece of the tapestry. It’s Always Been You! sees the tapestry at play; the past as fetish, romanticizing a future, and the present as crisis. “

“A chief element of Debord’s spectacle is its effect on landscapes and pockets of time and place where not only does the past dominate the present, but the image of the place comes to dominate the current reality of it. In New York there are endless discussions of the ‘real’ New York, implying of course that there is a false New York, a phony place constructed to be the epitome of the outsider’s mental image. This, of course, is a mark of our times, where banalized landscapes are offered up as sacrifices to the popular imagination, cinema itself plays its role, as well as international tourism. Once a place or event has been properly frozen in time, it can become a destination we congregate around. Midtown Manhattan being one such landscape, a phony hint of amusement park-style constructed reality where “the locals never go”. Those who’ve spent their lives in this city lament the loss of the gritty, rough days of old New York, where the city was a living document, a common characteristic that most cities share in the early years of the twenty-first century. “