Thirteen years ago, I sat down with a filmmaker who had spent his life warning us about a future we are now living inside.

Godfrey Reggio is the director of Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi, the Qatsi trilogy. Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi word. It means life out of balance.

In our conversation, he said something I have never been able to shake:

“It’s our behavior that determines the content of our mind. We become what we do. We become what we see. We become the routine that we are a part of.”

Read that again. Slowly.

Now look at your phone. Look at your feed. Look at the average screen time of the people around you, including yourself.

When Reggio made Koyaanisqatsi in 1982, the warning was about industry, speed, and the slow severing of the human from the natural. When we spoke in 2013, he told me we were already living in the cyborg state. Not because chips were in our heads, but because the rhythm of our attention had already been outsourced.

That was before TikTok. Before generative AI. Before recommendation engines learned to predict our desires faster than we could feel them.

The frame was right. The timeline was conservative.

Technology is not the Why. Technology is not even the What. Technology is the How.

The question Reggio kept pointing us toward, thirty years before the AI wave, is the only one that still matters:

What kind of beings do we want to become, given that we are becoming whatever we repeat?

Thirteen years later, this conversation hits harder than the day we recorded it.

🎧 Full interview [ https://www.singularityweblog.com/godfrey-reggio-koyaanisqatsi/](https://www.singularityweblog.com/godfrey-reggio-koyaanisqatsi/)

Godfrey Reggio is an inventor of a film style that creates poetic images of extraordinary emotional impact for audiences worldwide. Reggio is prominent in the film world for his Qatsi trilogy – Koyaanisqatsi: Live Out of Ballance, Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation, and Naqoyqatsi: Life as War, essays of visual images and sound that chronicle the destructive impact of the modern world on the environment.

Thanks to my friend Tom Lowe, I was very fortunate to attend the premiere of Godfrey’s latest film – Visitors. In my view Visitors is one of those fundamentally important films that one simply has to watch. If you are fortunate enough to see the film the way I did – in glorious 4k and accompanied by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra live performance of Philip Glass’ original music score, then I guarantee it will be a movie experience like no other. And chances are that it will touch and move your heart even if it doesn’t do so for your head.

I would also suggest that you must go and watch at least Reggio’s first film – Koyaanisqatsi. [If you can also see Visitors it will be even better.] Otherwise, it is unlikely you will get many of the references we are discussing during the interview.