By Sinclair + Stephan Dubreuil

Through their company Artists Equity,  Ben Affleck and Matt Damon produced and starred in the police thriller RIP. And they stopped in at the Joe Rogan Experience to promote their new production, jokingly mentioning the regular press junkets on the circuit, speculating that talking to Joe Rogan alone could potentially be more viable than the aggregate of all their other interviews. 

Among many other things, Affleck and Damon talked about Hunter S. Thompson, Chris Nolan’s Odyssey, MMA Fighting and the very astutely produced Adolescence, vaunting its straight up no-formula streamer production. The two brought up their negotiation with Netflix, and the decision to go for a streaming release instead of a theatrical one. They knew subjecting some of the plotting to data could make their film that much more successful.

Netflix, they noted, outlined five tiers of performance tied to financial incentives, with the highest defined by a 110% watch rate, meaning every subscriber watches a title, with some returning for repeat viewings. A rare occurrence.

More tellingly, they were encouraged to have a set piece in the first five minutes as well as reiterating the plot several times. The data suggests viewers are often distracted, on their phones or simply less attentive while watching amid the comforts and interruptions of domestic life. Add to that the growing share of content consumed on smartphones, and it is little wonder audiences are increasingly served repeated plot beats and oversized moments at sometimes incongruous points.

Affleck articulated the average viewer’s calculus succinctly: the cumulative cost of a large flatscreen, sound system, subscriptions, and reliable Wi-Fi has effectively recreated a customizable theater at home. Small surprise, then, that many contemporary streaming titles are written for the “second screen,” more tell than show,  a reversal of the cinematic language Affleck and Damon grew up in.

The consolation is that film buffs will always know what filmmakers’ work is meant to be seen in cinemas, on the big screen. For example, Affleck mentioned Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Odyssey. 

The industry has spent the past few years narrating its own disruption (pandemic aftershocks, labor strikes, AI, the recalibration of streaming) as if uncertainty were a temporary condition. Rogan’s widely circulated episode offers something clearer: not resolution, but recognition. From Affleck and Damon’s vantage point, the path forward is less about stability than about momentum. Films are still getting made. Deals are still closing. Careers are still steaming ahead. Uncertainty, it seems, is the only constant.

Pierre “Pyaré” Friquet is a French XR creator and director whose work spans fiction, documentary, video games, and immersive experiences. A graduate of the Film & Television Institute of India, he developed early on an approach that blends classical storytelling, technological innovation, and sensory experimentation.

PYARé is best known for his award-winning immersive works. Spaced Out, his aquatic VR installation, was selected at the Sundance Festival and showcased in the cultural program of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. He was creative collaborator and editor on the VR documentary You Destroy, We Create, produced by Meta, was nominated for an Emmy Award and won a Peabody Award. His pieces Jet Lag, Vibrations and Patterns have been presented at Cannes, NewImages, MUTEK, and the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma.

His work as a director and narrative designer also extends to video games (Captain Nemo, Kei’s Dream), AR, video mapping, immersive domes, and social VR. He has collaborated with major artists and institutions, including Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Michel Jarre, Marc Caro, Chanel, Christie’s, Orange, and the French Ministry of Culture.

PYARé is the founder of NiGHT Immersion, a studio combining art and technology, behind MeRCURY, a waterproof VR mask designed for pool-based experiences. His work has been featured in Wired, Forbes, The Verge, Vice, CNET, and Rolling Stone.

After living in India, South Africa, and Canada, he is now based in Paris, where he is completing a video game for Meta as well as a documentary for an American streaming platform.

Director’s Statement:
Collectively, we have all become tethered to our phones. They are extensions of us. In an era where information is the most valuable commodity on the planet, our phones know us better than we know ourselves. Social media apps hypnotize us with an endless scroll of beautiful people and posts targeted at us by an algorithm. All while collecting our data — recording our personalities, our memories, the way we look and sound. The very fiber of our being. We have given big data permission to own our faces… to own us. But what happens when the lines between reality and idealized “perfection” become blurred?

“Selfie” Credits:
John Poliquin
Director

This month’s 2025 edition of Mutek is in full swing. We particularly enjoyed London-based Harry Yeff’s talk on his research regarding creative applications for A.I. and machine learning. He focuses on performance, vocal experiments, and digital installations. He seamlessly gets in there between the human voice and technology, challenging conventional boundaries and promoting human-machine collaboration.

And mad respect for Kalmyk-American poet and language artist Sasha Styles whose award-winning work “bridges tradition and innovation through hybrid poetics, generative imagination, and collaborative intelligence. Her transmedia practice reframes poetry as both art and technology — a means of encoding experience across time — and blends word, image and algorithm to explore human voice in a digital age.”

.

And it is worth mentioning Phoebe Greenberg’s immersive project Blur, a mixed-reality theatre experience that explores this liminal state between life and death, fact and fiction. Greenberg teamed up with famed contemporary dance choreographer Edouard Lock. We only saw glimpses of it as it will premiere at La Biennale di Venezia next week.

And last but not least: props to Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer who gave a brilliant talk on his body of work.

“Tyler Cowen, an economist and writer, talks with me about how AI is changing writing and research. He explains a practical approach to using AI tools while maintaining your own voice and the ways he incorporates LLMs into his daily work. We talk about how people will be writing fewer books in the future and how he believes truly human writing will stand out among AI-generated content.”