Riusi generativi
Works that investigates the relationship between archives and Artificial Intelligence.
In partnership with John Cabot University
CINEMA INTRASTEVERE – Room 2, May 30, 4:30 p.m.
09/05/1982
Jorge Caballero, Camilo Restrepo / Mexico, Spain / 2025 / 11’
A deteriorated film, shot in 1982 in a Latin American country, presents a succession of everyday images, among which some stand out as bearing witness to the violent events that took place on 9 May of that year. As the images unfold, a male voice narrates the official version of events. Beneath its apparent banality, the film raises the suspicion that what really happened has been covered up.
An Uncanny Dialogue
Alessandro Turchioe / Italy / 2025 / 12’
Uncanny Dialogue stages a clash between two voices in a blurred space where images generated by artificial intelligence and live footage merge into one another. By interweaving Roland Barthes’ lament in Camera Lucida with a tech visionary’s celebration of manipulation, the film explores what happens to visual evidence—not only of events, but also of people’s inner lives—when neither these nor the moments that captured them may ever have existed.
Uncanny Dialogue is part of a wider series that explores how AI is reshaping our lives in small, almost imperceptible ways, altering our ways of thinking and the means through which we interact with culture.
Cold and Dim
Piero Fragola / Italy / 3’
This music video is the result of a creative project that blends artificial intelligence with traditional analogue film techniques, giving rise to a unique experiment within today’s audiovisual landscape. This experimental fusion of the artificial and the natural aims to challenge the concepts of craftsmanship and artistic exploration.
I am everything
Jeppe Lange / Denmark / 2025 / 12’
An artificial intelligence develops self-awareness and reflects on humanity’s moral codes and social structures.
Using art history and the internet’s infinite archive of images as building blocks, Jeppe Lange has created a thought-provoking and subtly humorous work in which a (fictional) artificial intelligence that develops self-awareness observes humanity’s moral limits from a new perspective. Just as the spectra of light and sound extend beyond human perception, the AI discovers a mental spectrum far vaster than any individual mind can comprehend, creating an unprecedented connection between technology and the hidden patterns of nature.
Manual Of Self-Destruction
Elisa Baccolo / Italy / 2025 / 19’
After realising that an artificial intelligence model is altering her self-portraits by imposing unattainable beauty standards, E. begins to suspect that these models are nothing more than a sublimation of something that already plagues contemporary society.
Ping Pong
Tianji Yu / China / 2025 / 15’
A game of table tennis becomes a metaphor for closeness and alienation: director Tianji Yu engages in a conversation with an artificial intelligence about lost friendships, political divisions and immateriality. From a mundane conversation emerges a poetic reflection on memory, absence and the human being as a political entity.
The Future Is Now Finally Weird
Silvia Dal Dosso / Austria / 2025 / 13’
Structured in three parts, the film presents a visionary narrative set in a post-post-post-truth world, where artificial intelligence generates voices, identities and alternative realities. Guiding the viewer is the synthetic voice of British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, known for his essay films on the history of power, the media and social manipulation, recreated here using voice cloning software.
Deceased celebrities brought back to life, billionaires fleeing underground, virtual influencers, emotional advertising and relationships with bots populate the film’s dystopian and hyper-real setting. Composed entirely of archive footage, the work moves between cultural criticism, memetic aesthetics and satirical visions of the present, offering a chaotic and unsettling portrait of the era of generative AI.
Ask Me for Those Unborn Promises that May Seem Unlikely to Happen in the Natural
Donatella della Ratta
in partnership with THE VOID (Tommaso Campagna & Jordi Viader Guerrero)
Generative artificial intelligence creates speculative images that, while not based on real events, remain plausible, constructing realities that have yet to unfold. Situated more in the realm of possibility than empirical certainty, these images introduce a new form of “synthetic realism.” They reshape the past and present through their world-building potential, and it is precisely in their apparent innocence — lacking concrete references, historical roots, genealogies, or context — that they exert a silent yet profound violence against history and factual reality.
Donatella Della Ratta’s lecture performance, explores “speculative violence,” an emerging mode of the image’s existence, oscillating between explicit destruction and subtle, almost imperceptible effects. Combining text and visuals — including found footage, social media threads, and AI-generated media — the work leads the audience on a disquieting journey through the violence of the not-yet-realized, navigating symbols and contemporary landscapes from Palestine to Trump’s America, and involving, even, groups of unsuspecting cows.