David Cronenberg would like to implant a consumer recommendation engine in your brain

By Dennis DiClaudio | September 12, 2013 | 10:15pm

Aux Features Film

David Cronenberg would like to implant a consumer recommendation engine in your brain

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If ever there was a filmmaker who was going to try to convince viewers to implant "a truly unique life form" into their brains for the sake of art, it was going to be David Cronenberg. Body/Mind/Change is some kind of multimedia biological horror-art project, co-produced by TIFF and the Canadian Film Centre’s Media Lab, in which participants are invited to register for their very own POD, a living, breathing consumer recommendation engine that, "through a process called synoptic entanglement," melds its own personality with their own so that they may pursue "a smarter, more purposeful life" of happy shopping. First of all, yuck. Second of all, a non-satirical version of this is probably going to be the next iPhone.

Though the Canadian filmmaker is the face and voice of the BMC project—and it clearly draws inspiration from Cronenberg's ickier, slimier biotech-themed films like Videodrome and eXistenZ—The Last Broadcast's Lance Weiler serves as creative director. Whatever this odd enterprise is should launch properly on October 25, at which point registered participants will get the chance to go through an "episodic interactive narrative" featuring God knows what kind of weirdness that will culminate in the generation of the participant's own POD. This is probably meant as a selling point.