CORE DUMP is a born-digital fictional short CGI film depicting a surreal flock of drones hunting for e-waste. The film borrows its title from a term describing a computer's documented memory when a program—or the computer as a whole—fails. The film's scenery, designed and operated in a gaming engine, happens in a 3D-fabricated desert-like post-industrial landscape with an open dump site stacked with household junk. Picking up on Climate Fiction, CORE DUMP is a hyper-realistic fantasy referring to e-waste management politics in the West, when trashed electronic products are often shipped to developing countries in Asia and Africa, only to be burned by individuals. It also addresses the future of post-industrial landscapes, contemplating 21st-century warfare and links between environmental and geopolitical conditions. The work addresses, abstractly and concretely, the difficulty of transporting goods during a siege, the usage of drone swarms in warfare, the destruction of historical monuments during combat action, and more.  

CORE DUMP is part of CITY DUMMIES, an evolving series of born-digital motion clips and interactive video games created using a gaming engine, depicting hyper-realistic fabricated urban sceneries with surreal embodied machines at play. The series comments on today's increasingly commerce-dominated cityscapes. The works are shown in both exhibition and film festival contexts. Most of the works are short-form videos, with CORE DUMP one of the longest and, technically, the most complex and ambitious of them. 

CGI Environment, lighting, VFX: Rachid Moro 
Cinematography: Wallace David, Rachid Moro 
Sound design: Rachid Moro, Daphna Keenan 
Programming: Eagle Wux 
CGI R&D: Federico Zurani

With support from: Stiftung Kunstfonds, the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Artis. 

Photocredits: Alona Rodeh and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn