Danielle Kaganov

Film

Inside a medical training facility, one of the Da Vinci surgical robots—originally designed for remote surgeries, enabling surgeons to operate on patients from afar, often overseas—awakens to its own autonomy. Once a mute object serving a vast system, it becomes aware of its actions. This self-awareness sets it on a journey through the facility—a hybrid space where clinical training blurs with echoes of warfare.

As it explores the corridors and hidden rooms of the institution, the robot finds that in another wing of the facility, identical robots are embedded in real-time battlefields, operated remotely by unseen hands.

The Da Vinci Robot was developed initially by the U.S. Army in the 1980s to operate on injured soldiers in remote battlefields, controlled by surgeons located in the United States in real time. Only years later, in 1990, it was reintroduced and adopted within the civilian sector of public medicine.

The film uses the robot’s voyage through the building as an excavation of medical progress and of posthuman warfare. As the robot confronts the fragments of its own past, it must reconcile the contradiction of being both a tool of care and a weapon of precision

Danielle Kaganov

Artist and filmmaker based in France. Her work focuses on film, performance, and installation. She was a resident at HISK, Belgium (2022-2023). Her works were shown in exhibitions and festivals such as Docaviv, Printscreen, and the Prussia Foundation in Vienna (2023). She has received several awards, including the Cooper prize (2017), the first prize at TISFF experimental competition (2020), and the Ilana Elovic prize (2022). Her practice consists of long-term projects inspired by media, popular culture, consumerism, and history. Her research involves taking on a minor position within established and institutionalized systems such as the entertainment industry or a political party.

Production

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