LOCK (2021) is a speculative film forecasting the future of decentralized personal-development movements. The film shadows the lives of three people swept up in a digital form of peer to peer therapy called LOCK. Leaderless, this community begins to radicalize itself as practitioners become increasingly invested in developing alternative models for living a meaningful life. Guided by hope, the film questions the desires which drive users to insulate themselves from the outside world.

Merging film production stock footage with a range of artificial intelligence techniques, including DeepFakes, Image Breeding and SPADE, the film builds upon the previous collaborative work of Crawford and Cornish-Ward, aiming to place a stake in the ground for contemporary cinema ignited by web 3.0.

Overshadowed by contemporary events, this project opens up a conversation around the nihilistic and utopian worldviews shaping digital isolationism today. The outcome of this project is an engaging and immersive video installation choreographed to display multiple asynchronous narratives. The film portrays a hybrid reality, where the growth of decentralized, autonomous and radicalized individuals is presented through a rabbit hole of synthetic media.