The Signal Line

About 50 years ago, the CIA was looking for new ways to collect intelligence, and launched a secret program on psychic vision and extrasensory perception. Is it a coincidence that this happened at the same time and place as the creation of the internet?

As we look on astounded, well-trained individuals open themselves up to invisible signals, and describe the contents of sealed envelopes (their “targets”) with an astonishing acuity. Reproducing the protocol put in place by the CIA during the Cold War, Simon Ripoll-Hurier and his co-screenwriter, Myriam Lefkowitz, choose nearby locations as the objects of these psychic sessions, drawing ever closer in concentric circles to Silicon Valley’s seats of power. Two relationships to information collide: the archaic, physical and fallible method of remote viewers as opposed to the more or less legal collection of data and their storage in a cloud—a cloud that some claim will soon replace the brain, which is itself being scrutinised in a nearby lab. The psychics trained here are becoming obsolete: with their eyes closed, they let their hand scribble across a sheet of paper and propose a poetic interpretation of their targets. The information they capture lacks the clarity of zeroes and ones and conjure up reality obliquely. When will our technologies be able to replace Loretta Mears, a chiropractor and healer who uses her intuition to visualise her patients’ ailments and treat them more effectively? Guided by a female narrator who introduces herself as an incarnate “I”, The Signal Line sketches out the perspective of an information society that will leave no room for the mists of the living. Yet, whatever their origin, data can be manipulated and, through the editing, the film itself produces a reality of its very own. Stretched tight between subjectivity and objectivity, it reminds us that the answer to any question depends on the way the question is formulated. 

Olivia Cooper-Hadjian