Blurry, shifting and surreal – a brand new AI aesthetic emerges within the film

Enter text into AI image and video generators and also you'll often see unusual, sometimes scaryPictures.

In some ways, this can be a feature, not a bug, of generative AI. And artists are using this aesthetic to create a brand new art type of storytelling.

The tools, equivalent to In the center of the journey to create images, runway And Sora Produce videos and Forward AI B. for creating 3D objects, are relatively low-cost or free to make use of. They allow filmmakers who don't have access to large studio budgets or sound stages to make imaginative short movies for the worth of a monthly subscription.

I studied these recent works as co-director of the AI for media and storytelling Studio on the University of Southern California.

I teamed up with curators Jonathan Wells and Meg Gray Wells to look at the increasingly compelling work of artists from all over the world Flux Festivala four-day presentation of AI filmmaking experiments, in November 2024.

Although this work stays dizzyingly eclectic in its stylistic diversity, I’d argue that it offers traces of insight into our world today. I keep in mind that scholars in each literary and film studies consider this As cultures change, the best way we tell stories also changes.

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

1. Transforming, blurry images

In her “NanoFictions” series, the French artist presents Caroline Georges creates portraits of transformation. In short: “The beast“A burly man mutates from a bipedal human right into a hunched, skeletal cat before transforming right into a snarling wolf.

The metaphor – man is a monster – is obvious. But what's much more compelling is the exciting fluidity of transformation. It's a dizzying pleasure to see the seamless evolution of the character, expressing a really contemporary sense of shape-shifting in our many digital selves.

This sense of transformation continues in using blurred images, which within the hands of some artists grow to be more of an aesthetic feature than an annoying problem.

Theo Lindquist “Electronic Dance Experiment #3,” for instance, begins with a series of quick shots showing flashes of naked bodies in a soft, pulsating, throbbing wash of pastel colours. Gradually it becomes clear that this strange flow of flesh is a dance. But abstraction within the blur offers its own pleasure; The image is as tangible because it is visible.

2. The surreal

Thousands of TikTok videos show how this is completed scary AI images can get, but artists can harness that craziness and switch it into something transformative. The Singaporean artist often called Nice aunts creates videos of older women and cats playing around the concept of “aunt” from Southeast and East Asian cultures.

In a recent video, the aunts spray powerful clouds of hairspray to carry up inconceivable clumps of hair – a sequence that becomes increasingly ridiculous. While playful and poignant, the videos Niceaunties create can pack a political punch. For example, they comment on assumptions about gender and age, but in addition address current issues equivalent to environmental pollution.

On the darker side, the artist called out in a music video titled “Forest Never Sleeps”… Dopiidoo features hybrid octopus women, guitar-playing rats, rooster pigs and a wood-chopping ostrich man. The visual chaos matches beautifully with the accompanying death metal music, with surrealism returning as a robust form.

3. Dark stories

The often eerie atmosphere of so many AI-generated images lends itself well to chronicling contemporary evils, a indisputable fact that several filmmakers exploit to unexpected effect.

In “The Window” Lucas Ortiz Estefanell the AI ​​agency SpecialGuestX combines diverse image sequences of individuals and places with a thoughtful voice-over to ponder ideas about reality, privacy and the lives of artificially created people. At the identical time, he wonders concerning the strong desire to create these synthetic worlds. “When I saw this video for the first time,” the narrator remembers, “the meaning of the image no longer made sense.”

In the music video titled “Closer”, based on a song by Iceboy Violet and Nueen, filmmaker Mau grunts captures the world-weary exhaustion of Generation Z through dozens of teenage characters, often sleeping within the green glow of video screens. The snapshot of a generation coming of age within the age of social media and now artificial intelligence, pictured here with phones pressed to their bodies as they murmur of their sleep, feels quietly jarring.

4. Nostalgia

Sometimes filmmakers resort 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,” showcasing the vastness and energy of the town through breakdancing as children run through alleys after which magically rise into the air.

Ciulu says he desired to capture the urban milieu of New York that he experienced as a baby from afar in Italy. The video thus evokes a way of nostalgia for a mythical time and place, making a memory that can also be hallucinatory.

Similar, David Slades “Shadow Rabbit” draws on black-and-white imagery harking back to the Nineteen Fifties and shows young children discovering miniature animals crawling on their hands. In just seconds, Slade represents children's enchanting imaginations and pairs them with generated images, highlighting AI's ability to create imaginative worlds.

5. New times, recent 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 through the seemingly limitless hallway of a faculty bus, through the highschool cafeteria, and out onto the highway at night. The video perfectly captures the vastness of time and the collapse of space for somebody young, in love, and hurtling unhappily through the world.

The free-roaming camera also characterizes the work of the Montreal-based duo Duhamel Valleywhose music video “The Pulse Within” twists and swirls and races around characters free of the laws of gravity.

In each music videos, viewers experience time and space as a shimmering, topsy-turvy vortex by which the foundations of traditional time and space not apply.

Right now, in a world where… Algorithms are increasingly shaping on a regular basis lifemany artistic endeavors are starting to reflect how intertwined we’re with computer systems.

What if machines suggested recent ways to see ourselves while we concurrently taught them to see like humans?