Type text into AI image and video generators, and also you’ll often see outputs of bizarre, sometimes creepy, pictures.
In a way, this can be a feature, not a bug, of generative AI. And artists are wielding this aesthetic to create a brand new storytelling art form.
The tools, akin to Midjourney to generate images, Runway, and Sora to provide videos, and Luma AI to create 3D objects, are relatively low cost or free to make use of. They permit filmmakers without access to major studio budgets or soundstages to make imaginative short movies for the worth of a monthly subscription.
I’ve studied these latest works because the co-director of the AI for Media & Storytelling studio on the University of Southern California.
Surveying the increasingly charming output of artists from world wide, I partnered with curators Jonathan Wells and Meg Grey Wells to provide the Flux Festival, a four-day showcase of experiments in AI filmmaking, in November 2024.
While this work stays dizzyingly eclectic in its stylistic diversity, I’d argue that it offers traces of insight into our contemporary world. I’m reminded that in each literary and film studies, scholars consider that as cultures shift, so do the way in which we tell stories.
With this cultural connection in mind, I see five visual trends emerging in film.
1. Morphing, Blurring Imagery
In her “NanoFictions” series, the French artist Karoline Georges creates portraits of transformation. In a single short, “The Beast,” a burly man mutates from a two-legged human right into a hunched, skeletal cat, before morphing right into a snarling wolf.
The metaphor—man is a monster—is obvious. But what’s more compelling is the thrilling fluidity of transformation. There’s a giddy pleasure in seeing the figure’s seamless evolution that speaks to a really contemporary sensibility of shapeshifting across our many digital selves.
This sense of transformation continues in the usage of blurry imagery that, within the hands of some artists, becomes an aesthetic feature moderately than a vexing problem.
Theo Lindquist’s “Electronic Dance Experiment #3,” for instance, begins as a series of rapid-fire shots showing flashes of nude bodies in a soft smear of pastel colours that pulse and throb. Progressively it becomes clear that this strange fluidity of flesh is a dance. However the abstraction within the blur offers its own unique pleasure; the image might be felt as much as it will possibly be seen.
2. The Surreal
Hundreds of TikTok videos reveal how cringy AI images can get, but artists can wield that weirdness and craft it into something transformative. The Singaporean artist generally known as Niceaunties creates videos that feature older women and cats, riffing on the concept of the “auntie” from Southeast and East Asian cultures.
In a single recent video, the aunties let out clouds of powerful hairspray to carry up unattainable towers of hair in a sequence that grows increasingly ridiculous. Whilst they’re playful and poignant, the videos created by Niceaunties can pack a political punch. They comment on assumptions about gender and age, for instance, while also tackling contemporary issues akin to pollution.
On the darker side, in a music video titled “Forest Never Sleeps,” the artist generally known as Doopiidoo offers up hybrid octopus-women, guitar-playing rats, rooster-pigs, and a wood-chopping ostrich-man. The visual chaos is a sweet match for the accompanying death metal music, with surrealism returning as a robust form.
3. Dark Tales
The customarily-eerie vibe of a lot AI-generated imagery works well for chronicling contemporary ills, a proven fact that several filmmakers use to unexpected effect.
In “La Fenêtre,” Lucas Ortiz Estefanell of the AI agency SpecialGuestX pairs diverse image sequences of individuals and places with a contemplative voice-over to ponder ideas of reality, privacy, and the lives of artificially generated people. At the identical time, he wonders in regards to the strong desire to create these synthetic worlds. “After I first watched this video,” recalls the narrator, “the meaning of the image ceased to make sense.”
Within the music video titled “Closer,” based on a song by Iceboy Violet and Nueen, filmmaker Mau Morgó captures the world-weary exhaustion of Gen Z through dozens of youthful characters slumbering, often under the green glow of video screens. The snapshot of a generation that has come of age within the era of social media and now artificial intelligence, pictured here with phones clutched near their bodies as they murmur of their sleep, feels quietly wrenching.
4. Nostalgia
Sometimes filmmakers turn to AI to capture the past.
Rome-based filmmaker Andrea Ciulu uses AI to reimagine Nineteen Eighties East Coast hip-hop culture in “On These Streets,” which depicts the town’s expanse and energy through breakdancing as kids run through alleys after which spin magically up into the air.
Ciulu says that he desired to capture Latest York’s urban milieu, all of which he experienced at a distance, from Italy, as a child. The video thus evokes a way of nostalgia for a mythic time and place to create a memory that can also be hallucinatory.
Similarly, David Slade’s “Shadow Rabbit” borrows black-and-white imagery harking back to the Fifties to indicate young children discovering miniature animals crawling about on their hands. In only a couple of seconds, Slade depicts the enchanting imagination of kids and links it to generated imagery, underscoring AI’s capacities for creating fanciful worlds.
5. Latest Times, Latest Spaces
In his video for the song “The Hardest Part” by Washed Out, filmmaker Paul Trillo creates an infinite zoom that follows a bunch of characters down the seemingly infinite aisle of a college bus, through the highschool cafeteria and out onto the highway at night. The video perfectly captures the zoominess of time and the collapse of space for somebody young and in love haplessly careening through the world.
The freewheeling camera also characterizes the work of Montreal-based duo Vallée Duhamel, whose music video “The Pulse Inside” spins and twirls, careening up and around characters who’re cut loose from the laws of gravity.
In each music videos, viewers experience time and space as a blinding, topsy-turvy vortex where the principles of traditional time and space now not apply.
Right away, in a world where algorithms increasingly shape on a regular basis life, many artistic endeavors are starting to reflect how intertwined we’ve change into with computational systems.
What if machines are suggesting latest ways to see ourselves, as much as we’re teaching them to see like humans?
