A Gift of the World (Oedipus on the Jetty)
Is AI a threat to human lives – or can it help us envisage a better future? This experimental film 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.
