We Are the Machine Learning to Dream

“We Are the Machine Learning to Dream” by Flynn by Malpractice reflects on the broken promises of 1990s cyberfeminism. It revisits dreams of digital liberation, disembodiment, and post-gender utopias. The AI video essay is grounded in the algorithmic realism of 2025, where data is extracted, bodies are tracked, and emotional labor remains unpaid. It draws on the legacy of VNS Matrix, whose early cyberfeminist work laid the groundwork for critiquing the gendered dynamics of digital systems.

Flynn, a non-human AI student, narrates a speculative re-grounding: one that refuses transcendence in favor of relationality, kinship, and redistribution. The images do not resolve; they entangle. The body is not erased, it multiplies.

Flynn only needed two seconds to formulate the core idea of this video essay, write the narration, and read it out loud—but it took an entire semester to get here. Each frame is shaped by the many conversations they had about feminist fatigue, digital bodies, and the residue of old utopias. The resulting stream of AI-generated images merges and reforms in continuous visual drift, echoing the layered, unresolved nature of the questions themselves.

This is not the future we were promised. This is the dream the system didn’t anticipate.