What the new aesthetics of artificial intelligence in cinema says about us

Enter text into AI image and video generators and you’ll often see unusual, sometimes creepy images coming out.

In some ways, this is a feature, not a bug, of generative AI. And artists are using this aesthetic to create a new art form that tells stories.

Tools like Midjourney for creating images, Runway and Sora for creating videos, and Luma AI for creating 3D objects are relatively cheap or free to use. They allow filmmakers without access to large studio budgets or sound stages to make original short films for the price of a monthly subscription.

I studied this new work while co-directing the AI ​​for Media & Storytelling studio at the University of Southern California.

Seeing increasingly exciting work from artists around the world, I collaborated with curators Jonathan Wells and Meg Gray Wells to organize the Flux Festival in November 2024, a four-day showcase of experimentation in filmmaking using artificial intelligence.

While this work remains dizzyingly eclectic in its stylistic diversity, I would argue that it offers traces of insight into our modern world. I am reminded that scholars of both literature and film believe that as cultures change, so does the way we tell stories.

Given this cultural connection, I see five visual trends emerging in film.

1. Morphing, blurring images

In her NanoFictions series, French artist Caroline Georges creates portraits of transformation. In one short film, “The Beast,” a large man mutates from a bipedal man to a hunched, skeletal cat, and then turns into a snarling wolf.

The metaphor – man – monster – is clear. But what’s even more compelling is the breathtaking fluidity of the transformation. There is a dizzying pleasure in watching the figure’s fluid evolution, which speaks to a very modern sensitivity to the changing shape of our multiple digital selves.

This sense of transformation continues in the use of blurred imagery, which in the hands of some artists becomes more of an aesthetic feature than a nuisance.

Theo Lindqvist’s “Electronic Dance Experiment No. 3,” for example, opens with a series of quick shots showing flashes of naked bodies in soft brushstrokes of pastel colors that pulse and pulse. Gradually it becomes clear that this strange fluidity of flesh is a dance. But abstraction in blur has its own unique pleasure; the image can be felt as much as it can be seen.

2. Surreal

Thousands of TikTok videos show how awkward AI-generated images can be, but artists can harness that weirdness and turn it into something transformative. A Singaporean artist known as Niceaunties creates videos featuring elderly women and cats, using the concept of “auntie” from Southeast and East Asian cultures.

In one recent video, the aunties release clouds of powerful hairspray to hold up incredible towers of hair in an increasingly ridiculous sequence. While the videos created by Niceaunties are playful and poignant, they can pack a political punch. For example, they comment on assumptions about gender and age, and also address contemporary issues such as pollution.

On the other hand, in the music video titled “Forest Never Sleeps”, the artist known as Doopiidoo features hybrid female octopuses, guitar-playing rats, rooster pigs and an ostrich chopping wood. The visual chaos pairs perfectly with the accompanying death metal music, and the surrealism returns in powerful form.

3. Dark stories

The often eerie atmosphere of so much AI-generated imagery lends itself well to chronicling contemporary ills, a fact that some directors have exploited to unexpected effect.

In “La Fenêtre,” Lucas Ortiz Estefanell of AI agency SpecialGuestX combines diverse sequences of images of people and places with a contemplative voiceover to ponder ideas of reality, privacy, and the lives of artificially created people. At the same time, he wonders about the strong desire to create these synthetic worlds. “When I first watched the video,” the narrator recalls, “the meaning of the image stopped making sense.”

In a music video called “Closer,” based on a song by Iceboy Violet and Nueen, director Mau Morgo captured life-weary Gen Z through dozens of young characters snoozing, often under the green light of video screens. A snapshot of a generation that came of age in the age of social media and now artificial intelligence, pictured here with phones clutched to their bodies and muttering in their sleep, it seems quietly agonizing.

4. Nostalgia

Sometimes filmmakers turn to artificial intelligence to capture the past.

Rome-based director Andrea Ciulu uses artificial intelligence to reimagine 1980s East Coast hip-hop culture in On These Streets, which depicts the open spaces and energy of the city through breakdancing as children run down alleys and then magically rise up into the air.

Chulu says he wanted to capture the urban environment of New York, all of which he experienced from a distance, from Italy when he was a child. In this way, the video evokes a feeling of nostalgia for a mythical time and place, creating memories that are also hallucinatory.

Likewise, David Slade’s Shadow Bunny borrows black-and-white imagery reminiscent of the 1950s to show young children discovering miniature animals crawling on their arms. In just a few seconds, Slade captures the captivating imagination of children and connects it to the images they create, highlighting the power of AI to create whimsical worlds.

5. New times, new spaces

In his video for Washed Out’s “The Hardest Part,” director Paul Trillo creates an endless zoom that follows a group of characters down a seemingly endless school bus aisle, through a school cafeteria, and down a freeway. night. The video perfectly conveys the scale of time and the collapse of space for a young man in love, hopelessly traveling around the world.

The free-rotating camera also characterizes the work of Montreal duo Vallée Duhamel, whose music video for “The Pulse Within” spins and spins, rising up and around characters freed from the laws of gravity.

In both music videos, viewers experience time and space as a dazzling, upside-down vortex in which the rules of traditional time and space no longer apply.

Right now, in a world where algorithms increasingly shape everyday life, many works of art are beginning to reflect how intertwined we are with computing systems.

What if machines offer new ways of seeing ourselves, just like we teach them to see like humans?

This article was originally published on Talk To Holly Willis from the University of Southern California. Read the original article here.