Post Human Cinema
MARK AMERIKA, WILL LUERS, AND CHAD MOSSHOLDER
Ghost Presence, 2023
From Post Human Cinema series
NFT Video work
Ed. 15
PRICE: 0.1 ETH
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.
All ten of the works come with an original soundtrack by BAFTA-nominated sound artist Chad Mossholder as well as an AI-created voiceover reading from a script generated by Amerika's customized large language model. Amerika, who has exhibited digital art in many venues, including the Whitney Museum of Art Biennial, the Denver Art Museum, ZKM, the Walker Art Center, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the Marlborough Gallery in Barcelona, collaborated with Luers on the creation of the images. The two artists have individually produced many works of experimental digital narrative but for Posthuman Cinema, they engaged in a symbiotic call-and-response improvisational performance with various AI systems including RunwayML, Midjourney, ChatGPT, GPT-4, and ElevenLabs to probe a new kind of language-driven cinema art that explores the possible-but-not-yet future of AI art and storytelling.