I dreamt u were painting replicas of masterworks in Dafen Village. It was gouache and tasteless but u were doing what u loved. Numinous. Dark the way dreams are dark, like 4D Hentai in Heaven. Every object in ur living room was coated in concrete. Screens were windows onto snapshots of time, replaying the same footage with crude disregard for copyright. Every couch pillow sat limply like a painting. Angels worked around the clock, responding to prompts from invisible benshis behind closed curtains. Scammy MLM bots in latent space. Words gave birth to images. Unloaded guns lay impotently like plastic art. It was organized chaos. Machine time met human time and u knew nothing of the drama that came from reproducing reality with absolute fidelity. It was theater and it was ur last word in the argument against death.

“No one believes any longer in the ontological identity of model and image, but all are agreed that the image helps us to remember the subject and to preserve him from a second spiritual death.”

• André Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image (1967)

Ancient Egyptians met the finality of death with the resistance of embalming. They wrapped up flesh and bone to safeguard the corporeal from the snatch of time. As civilization evolved, the arts relieved this practice of its primordial function, content instead with surviving through portraits. Bazin argues that at the heart of image-making is the preservation of life by a representation of life—what he calls a ‘Mummy Complex’, making every image a ghost, a dwelling, a summoning. A last-gasp try against a second death. This drive for continued existence through technologies, from embalming to painting and ultimately, photography and cinema, has been plagued through history with the onus of representing life with complete fidelity. A task of creating “an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny.” (Bazin, What is Cinema? 10). Today, the drive experiences a rupture. The introduction of AI troubles the established ontology of images, shifting the question from one of survival and faithful representation to a broader concept—one of mastery. This technology imparts on our imaginaries a speculative quality, asking what we could be and how we are changing, based on the latent and the unreflective i.e. the cumulative material that machines receive from the world as ‘input’. This machine becomes a sieve through which passes an image of possibility.

For centuries, theorists quarreled over the ability to create an objective, impartial image—an image capable of reproducing reality. They questioned whether the presence of the machine interfered with and altered the social situation. The question now feels faintly relevant, begging for a reconsideration of its very genealogy. The objective image—technically and artistically masterful—is almost always a reactionary image. An image that enjoys the co-option and acceleration of a liberal economy; to say: bullish in its creation and blinding in its wake. In Tom Cohen’s 2018 essay Did the “Anthropocene” even take place?, he says: “Cinema is itself the forerunner and genealogical way station of A.I. today (“intelligence” has been always artifactual, that is techno-dependent, that is, arche-cinematic—which today encircles us as a forest of small and large screens). The latter has always involved a practice of de-extinction. It is difficult to braid the twin narratives we tell ourselves: that AI will arrive and transfigure all, and that mass extinction has now been materially triggered—as if there were a race between the two, which interface yet also separate and tend to eclipse one another.” So, to me, a more productive question seems to be “How are we changing?” instead of “Can we live forever?”

— Ruba Al-Sweel