Director and artist Smriti Keshari is known for her explosive multimedia installation The Bomb, about nuclear weapons, which she created with United Visual Artists, Eric Schlosser, Stanley Donwood, Kevin Ford, and The Acid.  Here, the Indian-born director talks about her latest film, a stratospheric portrait of divers mid-air, set to the sounds of The Acid's British DJ, Adam Freeland:

“The Selfish Gene came from a time when I was trying to understand the many ways that humanity can be immortal. It led me to read about evolutionary biology, and I became fascinated by Richard Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene, and the idea of the immortal gene. Dawkins seduced me into questioning a truth that seemed stranger than fiction.

“Dawkins presents humans as machines created by genes; a selfish machine programmed to do whatever is best for the genes as a whole. Hence, it's replicated from generation to generation, with genes existing now from tens of thousands of years ago.

“At this time, I was running quite regularly and began thinking of my body as a survival machine. In any physical performance, whether you're a runner, a swimmer, a diver or a surfer, you get into a flow where you're in tune with every movement of your body. Time slows down, you stop thinking, and the body performs.”