VALENTINE IN THINGS CITY
VIVIANE KOMATI
Viviane Komati is the pseudonym of Viviane El Kmati, who lives and works in Los Angeles. She works at the intersection of design, technology, and speculative fiction. With a background in architecture and worldbuilding (a term mostly used in game design), she prototypes the future of urban spaces using artificial intelligence and storytelling techniques.
For Valentine in Things City, Komati collaborated with filmmaker Liam Young. The video shows a colossal future warehouse designed and run by artificial intelligence.
The space and its production line are optimized for machine handling, making the environment impossible for humans to navigate on their own.
The story is inspired by how Amazon designs its distribution centers, including heavy technological optimization. Amazon even calls its employees ‘human pickers’, dehumanizing and downgrading them to tools. Still, halls get decorated festively according to the holiday season of the hour.
The film shows a future warehouse during Valentine’s Day when a girl breaks in to find a lost package. She is the only living being in a space forbidden for humans to enter but which caters to humans at the same time. The video shows a world that is already at our doorstep. Human proportion and influence reduce to near zero for a perfect efficiency that is ultimately never reached.