THE ROOMS

Watch the full film above. Click HD for best quality.

THE ROOMS looks back at the remnants of the 20th century through the eyes of the 21st.

Watching the film is like wandering through a ghosted world. You find yourself in unfamiliar places as if arriving in a dream, suddenly and without direction, yet with apparent logical precision. A theatre operates by and for itself; a museum archives its own contents; a city attempts to replicate language; an unfinished embassy recalls political turmoil; an abandoned spy station collects fragments of historical data and re-programmes itself. These Rooms operate as quantum architectures, forming and collapsing by themselves, defying categorisation.

With rich sound design and constantly shifting imagery, the film is a visually complex study of a world abandoned that somehow continues to operate. People exist only as echoes in the empty spaces.

Filmed in Italy, Greece, Germany, Spain, the United States and Korea, the numerous locations become the interconnected sites of a post-human environment. Disparate fragments come together to form a whole through the film's unique reading of time. The wages of human endeavour are levelled and treated as data. The perspectives of the past — modernist, machine, space-age — are scrutinised by a future that escaped prediction.

THE ROOMS is a collaborative project by Paul Rowley and Tim Blue made with the support of a Projects Grant from the Irish Arts Council. Music by Emily Manzo.