Latent Visions. Toward A Poetics of Transformation in Expanded Cinema and Agentic AI.

This artistic research investigates the phenomenological, aesthetic, and ethical implications of emerging AI systems that exhibit forms of agentic behavior, such as goal-directed reasoning or self-reflexive outputs. The project explores how these systems reshape human perception, cognition, and affective relationships. Situated at the intersection of expanded cinema, artificial intelligence (AI) approached through Science and Technology Studies (STS), and philosophical inquiry, the research engages the tension between materialist and idealist conceptions of consciousness across human and nonhuman systems.
Through a hybrid methodology combining filmmaking, critical theory, and AI-driven audiovisual experimentation, the project examines the role of latent space, i.e. multidimensional representation layers within neural networks, as both computational topology and cultural archive. By rendering these internal structures visible through audiovisual art, the research introduces the concept of cognitive cartography: a method for mapping how AI systems and humans construct internal models of reality.
Over four years, the project develops case studies as experimental artworks and conducts fieldwork in AI labs and socio-ecological “zones of friction,” where technological expansion collides with environmental or cultural resistance. Working through intuitive, process-based filmmaking, it explores a poetics of transformation—an aesthetic and ethical method for engaging more-than-human intelligences. The research culminates in a multimodal exhibition and a planned feature-length hybrid film exploring the evolving boundaries of human and nonhuman cognition.
Ultimately, the project seeks to contribute to new aesthetic and ethical paradigms for human-AI interaction, safeguarding creativity and subjectivity in an age of computational epistemology.