Postcards for the Future

Video Essay by Christine Reeh-Peters and Isabel Machado

HD, 13 min., 2025

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This experimental video essay explores the profound transformations of human identity and audiovisual culture in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Using mobile phones, video conferencing, AI visualisations and voiceover, the filmmakers examine the interface between humans and technology and a planet in crisis. With their speculative approach, they invite us to follow them in reflecting on the ethical, ecological and existential questions of our time. An audiovisual thought experiment, a meditation on the future of humanity, on non-human agency and on storytelling itself.

OUTLINE

Postcards for the Future is a short essay film composed by video notes recorded under the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. The film explores the changing human identity in an era of accelerated digital transformation and ecological crisis. At its core, the film is a self-reflective journey in which the two filmmakers Christine and Isabel become both protagonists and narrators, staging themselves in the fragmented, virtual spaces that reflect contemporary audiovisual culture. Their dialogue—in the form of a continuous voiceover, forms the narrative backbone of the film and guides the viewer through a meditation on self-digitization, image culture, a world in polycrisis, and speculative futures. Their presence in the digital sphere becomes a site of artistic enquiry: Who are we when we exist primarily through screens? What does it mean to be ‘real’ in a world where identity is increasingly algorithmic? How can we learn to embrace AI and other non-human entities?

The film moves between philosophical reflection and visual experimentation, blending reality with speculative fiction. AI-generated images and digitally produced visuals intersect with documentary-style footage, highlighting the growing role of non-human intelligence in shaping cultural narratives. Beyond its technological concerns, the film situates itself within the discourses around the Anthropocene, questioning the sustainability of human existence in an increasingly uninhabitable world. The film does not seek definitive answers but instead offers a series of video postcards—fragmentary glimpses into possible futures, shaped by both crisis and fabulative imagination.