NEVADA (Terms of Service)

A feline chimera speaks to us about Nevada's server farms, where our digital ghosts are kept morgue-cold. The film moves through fragments and observations: a grandmother's handwritten recipes, a widow conversing nightly with her dead husband's voice, and questions concerning what returns when we upload our lives to the cloud.

  • KENNETH COLLINS
    Director
  • KENNETH COLLINS
    Writer
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short, Web / New Media, Other
  • Genres:
    Experimental, Video Art, Essay Film, New Media, Synthetic Media
  • Runtime:
    6 minutes 33 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    October 12, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    30 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Synthetic Media
  • Aspect Ratio:
    9:4
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - KENNETH COLLINS

Kenneth Collins works in the gray space between the "black box" of theater and the "white cube" of the art gallery, creating projects at the intersection of visual art, digital media, theater, cinema, and artificial intelligence. His practice encompasses sculpture, video art, installation, performance, and synthetic media works that challenge the traditional boundaries between disciplines.

As founder and artistic director of Temporary Distortion (2000-present), named one of the "Best New York Theater Companies" by TimeOut NY Magazine, Collins has created work shown in over 30 cities across Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Greece, Hungary, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, and the United States. During this time, his company maintained its roots in New York City as an invested stakeholder in the downtown arts scene for 25 years.

His work as a visual artist has been exhibited at the Grand Palais Immersif (Paris), Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu (Poland), Benaki Museum (Greece), Bakhrushin Museum (Moscow), Aram Art Museum (South Korea), River City Bangkok, The Anchor of Arts & Antiques (Thailand), Yates Gallery (Chicago), and Ideal Glass Gallery (New York City).

Reflections on his work have been featured in numerous books including La vidéo en scène: L'acteur et ses technologies, Performance & Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field, Utopii performative: Artisti Radicali ai Scenei Americane in Secolul 21, the popular US introduction to theatre textbook, Theatre, Brief, among others. Academic essays on his work have been published in Yale's Theater, NYU's The Drama Review, UCSD’s TheatreForum, Queen Mary’s Contemporary Theatre Review, American Theater, Chance Magazine, and other industry leading periodicals.

Kenneth Collins serves as Assistant Professor of Media Art in the Department of Film & Media Arts at the University of Utah, where in Fall 2023 he became the first professor nationally to develop and teach a dedicated course in AI Filmmaking at a major university.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

I make work at the intersection of performance, cinema, and synthetic media. My films use computer-generated imagery not as novelty but as a means to explore questions about memory, preservation, and what we lose when we digitize our lives.

NEVADA (Terms of Service) is the first in a series of projects examining America's surrender to technology. Each state in the series serves as a different meditation on how we store, lose, and transform ourselves as we step into the future. The cat figures that narrate these films exist as nodes in an ancient network, speaking from a perspective that predates and outlasts human technology. They are simply the newest breed of the many cats that already colonize our screens.

I use the most contemporary tools available to me as an artist to question whether these tools serve us or extract from us, creating films about grief disguised as films about technology. Or maybe the other way around.