Posthuman Cinema is a collection of 10 episodes or “cinépoèmes” co-authored with AI. The audio-visual affect is one of an alien intelligence — though not one so distant as to be unrecognizable. The human creators, including DTC professor Will Luers, devised prompts for their AI counterparts based in avant-garde art and cinema, resulting in sci-fi/noir-like short films with the feel of haunting, twisted, and uncanny dreams.
The collection was exhibited at the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) in July. From the exhibit statement:
“The PHC artist collective (Mark Amerika, Will Luers, and Chad Mossholder), in human-AI symbiosis, is happy to exhibit their first collaborative art project, Posthuman Cinema, a collection of ten cinépoèmes that playfully experiment with AI as a form of otherworldly alien intelligence. In Posthuman Cinema, language and diffusion models come to life, vis-à-vis original text and image prompts that are designed to situate the works in the history of avant-garde and auteur-driven cinema art. All of the works are intentionally composed as moody black and white films that are reminiscent of the filmmakers that have most influenced the PHC artists including Agnes Varda, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Chantal Ackerman, Maya Deren and Andy Warhol. The imaginary bodies depicted in the AI-generated moving images are haunting, ghostly, uncanny, queer (in many senses of the term) and distorted. These phantom figures that appear to be women, men, trans, and cyborgs, are conceptualized as literal ghosts in the machine or what what Marcel Duchamp, writing about his famous artwork, La mariée mis à nu par ses célibataires, même (La boîte verte), referred to as an apparition of an appearance. As long-time digital artists with a deep affinity for and knowledge of the history of underground film, art, and literature, the PHC collective strategically uses their poetic art language skills to prompt the various AI systems to generate source material that is then post-produced into a series of artworks that are at times sensual, erotic, mystical, disturbing and ethereal.”