Nederlands Film Festival

Cinema squared: projection, sound design and animatronics, all in one. A medieval boy mistakes a raven for one of Odin's spies, in a tale that serves as a parable for the echo chamber AI so often creates.

In the background, a projection compresses eight days in 1349 — the first plague year on the Isle of Man — into a single hour. In the foreground stands an innovative animatronic figure of a boy wrestling with his sexual desires. Plus, a raven. The boy mistakes the bird for Huginn, the Norse god, hoping it will grant him forgiveness and salvation. But he fails to realise that the bird can do nothing but reflect his own guilt back at him — an analogy, of sorts, for our interactions with AI. The installation amounts to more than the sum of its parts, and in doing so, also says something about our age of artificial intelligence. All without a single trace of generative AI involved in making the work itself.

Special thanks to Stroom Den Haag