The Artificial Conjuring Circle

The Artificial Conjuring Circle is a short film produced entirely using local, open-source AI infrastructure. It explores the machine gaze and forms of non-human agency, generating speculative fabulations from the Novacene, an emergent era of collaboration between humans and non-humans aimed at sustaining life on Earth and slowing the accelerating extinction of organic life as we know it.

New systems of post-scarcity based on enhancing human self-realisation, cybernetic ecologies, and numerous new possibilities are attainable, but on one condition: overcoming the anthropocentric vision, accepting the current human status as an evolutionary step towards a new world shaped for synthetic living forms. As the film unfolds, we bear witness to the process of human reprogramming training, immersed in an artificial scenario where very little of organic life remains.

“On the one hand, the videos show images of deserted spaces as if made by surveillance cameras; on the other hand, they show journeys through digital, litigating spaces. The representations seem shapeshifting, dissolving objects and architecture, both horizontally and vertically; they switch again and again from an exterior space perspective into the inner life of the machine. The view leads from the surrounding space into the hardware and the program – and back again. Wires, objects, signs, symbols and meanings alternate with each other. The absence of people always awakens a feeling of there-used-to-be-something.“ — Tanja Brandmayr, Versorgerin #137, March 2023

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