Australian artist and director Shaun
Wilson uses all his creative resources to
realize a compelling vision of the future in
The Last Man in Vegas – a future
where technology and biology merge,
raising profound questions of humanity’s
destiny.
system shuts down, it kills everyone on the planet
but as a failsafe measure, it tries to restart itself by
manifesting the last 71 minutes of metadata in order
to kick-start back into operation. The characters that
walk around are really just manifestations of
metadata, or what I like to consider, the memories
of people caught at 71 minutes on loop before the
shutdown. The question then becomes – how do
you kill a memory?
Is this idea of a biological Internet based on real
science?
This is your first narrative feature film, can you
tell us about the movie?
It’s a film about a man named Elijah who can’t
distinguish between reality and fantasy, who
manifests an apocalyptic future controlled by the
Internet. The first half of the film is set in 2037
when the internet, now called ‘The Globe’ has
become so advanced that it controls people at a
DNA level – so metadata is stored on every living
thing, and with this comes being controlled by the
internet through DNA. When the entire Globe
There’s a lot of research that’s being undertaken at
the moment into how the Internet will evolve
through artificial intelligence, and already scientists
and engineers in Japan and the United States have
first generation robots that are programmed to think
for themselves through independent self-analysis.
It’s only a matter of time then for these kinds of
technologies to advance to the state where software
and hardware ultimately control humans. We can
see this through online technologies creeping into
our personal spaces and homes, for example, voice