Is AI a threat to human lives – or can it help us envisage a better future? Joanna Zylinska’s short experimental film, A Gift of the World (Oedipus on the Jetty), offers a posthumanist take on the apocalyptic themes of the present moment. Telling a gender fluid narrative of survival as dreamed up by the film’s director in co-creation with AI algorithms, it dismantles the myth of the male saviour in European history and the traditional family structure that props it. A Gift of the World (Oedipus on the Jetty) remediates Chris Marker’s famous apocalyptic photofilm, La Jetée, by training a StyleGAN2 model on stills extracted from Marker’s original while having a script written with the assistance of an AI language model. In this way, the film enacts an opening within our dominant stories of social, political and environmental malaise, while showing us that machines can dream in unexpected ways. As part of the screening, Zylinska will introduce her film while offering some wider reflections on its socio-political and technical aspects.

Joanna Zylinska is a writer, artist, curator and Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. She is a member of Creative AI Lab, a collaboration between King’s and Serpentine Galleries. Zylinska is an author of a number of books – including AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020) and Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017). An advocate of “radical open-access,” she is an editor of the MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW book series for Open Humanities Press. Her own art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. She is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while trying to map out scenarios for alternative futures. Her latest book is The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI (MIT Press, 2023, open access).