Posthuman Cinema

Chad Mossholder Will Luers Mark Amerika

2023

Medium: AI video with original soundtrack

Dimensions: varies

Price: Upon Request

Description: The PHC artist collective (Mark Amerika, Will Luers, and Chad Mossholder), in human-AI symbiosis, created 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 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.