AI FILMS
In human–machine collaboration, the artist can take the machine on as a means of self-expression and as a creative partner. By extending the senses through machine-learning algorithms, random functions and probabilistic processes, moving-image works can emerge that move beyond attraction and spectacle to engage with questions of self-reflexivity, technological society and immersion. In our work, AI is not an autonomous author. Generative artificial intelligence intersects with 2D animation, fine-tuned models, creative coding and hybrid documentary methods. Algorithmic image-making consequently reshapes the familiar relationships between visuality, narrative and the apparatus of artistic production.
The extension of perception and image-making through technical means has a long history in art. Perspective, anatomy, the microscope, photography and the telescope opened up new ways of seeing and made perceptible phenomena that had previously remained beyond direct human experience. In the history of computer art, the concept of programmability has been similarly significant. One of its early precedents can be found in the Jacquard loom, controlled by punched cards, an operating principle that later informed Charles Babbage’s conception of the Analytical Engine. As early as the nineteenth century, Ada Lovelace proposed that such a machine might extend beyond calculation and potentially engage with music and other creative operations. The algorithmic foundations of deep learning are not a recent development either. Their current expansion has been made possible by vast datasets, the internet and the rapid growth of computational power. In this sense, generative AI represents another stage in a much longer technological and artistic process, once again transforming the conditions under which images are produced and perceived.
New technologies have repeatedly confronted artists with unfamiliar situations. For us, engaging with artificial intelligence at an early stage means experiencing directly how these tools alter the process of making, while allowing us as artists to question their operation and their limits.
Our films emerge from this historical and technological continuity. They explore memory, machine-based image-making, creative collaboration between human and machine, and questions of non-human agency. At times, these concerns are approached through literary, art-historical or media-theoretical points of departure. We are interested in how the machine reshapes ideas of the image and authorship, and in what kinds of works can emerge from the encounter between human perception and machine vision.
