The Posthuman Cinema art project is a collaboration between artists Mark Amerika, Will Luers, and Chad Mossholder. The project launch is on October 26, 2023 in conjunction with a public sale of all ten artworks on the K011.com platform in conjunction with the Kate Vass Galerie (Zurich).
For this groundbreaking project of AI cinema, the artists investigate an interdependent and intervolutionary form of human-AI symbiosis, improvising with each other and with the various AI models they have customized to probe an emergent language-driven cinema art that explores the future of moving visual narrative.
As remix artists with a deep affinity for and knowledge of the history of avant-garde and auteur cinema, the artists strategically use their poetic art+language skills to prompt the various language and diffusion models to generate source material that is then postproduced into a series of unique artworks. The artists refer to the first ten of these artworks as cinépoèmes that playfully experiment with AI as an otherworldly alien intelligence.
“In Posthuman Cinema,” says Amerika, “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 experimental, underground and arthouse cinema. All of the works are intentionally composed as moody black and white films that are reminiscent of the filmmakers that have influenced all of us 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, distorted and sublime. These phantom figures that appear throughout the artworks are conceptualized as literal ghosts in the machine or 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.
All ten artworks come with an original soundtrack composed by BAFTA-nominated sound artist Chad Mossholder as a well as an AI-created voiceover reading from a script initially generated by Amerika’s customized large language model that was then remixed by the artists. To read the Posthuman Cinema Manifesto, visit the PHC website here.
