Archive trailer
Contains AI-assisted elements
This is a trailer for Archive is an AI-assisted video work based on historical photographs from the archives of the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, Wiki Commons and the Alexander Turnbull Library. It was commissioned by City Gallery Wellington, NZ in 2025 for the exhibition, "Messengers", which explores the enduring gaze shared between humans and other animals. The exhibition title is inspired by a line from John Berger’s seminal 1977 essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’ https://citygallery.org.nz/exhibition/messengers/ Using generative AI elements in Photoshop and OpenAI tools for still image transformation and Kling for animation, the piece reimagines archival photographs as a series of surreal, shifting vignettes. Each sequence—lasting between 20 seconds and just over a minute—takes an unexpected turn, blending documentary imagery with uncanny motion and dreamlike distortion. Archive doesn't attempt to reconstruct the past but to converse with it—to explore how memory, history, and machine learning can collide to create something strange, fluid, and new.
