Chiptide

Chiptide, 2025, Single-channel video, Belgium/VirtualWorld, HD, Color, 8:52 min. Synopsis In 2025, a Google infrastructure deal transforms a Belgian coastal region into a cooling system for AI computation. The flooding is deliberate, a cost optimization where human submersion becomes cheaper than server relocation. A new class of AI-adjacent workers adapts to life beneath the waterline, their bodies modified, their labour invisible. Between prediction errors and system glitches, a blind spot opens. Something uncalculated appears. But is it real, or has the narrator finally learned to see what the models cannot? Concept Chiptide is a video installation about prediction as infrastructure. In a submerged city built for computational cooling, voices surface in both image and blackout passages, making perception itself contested. We used generative AI models throughout production to select visual sequences, audio structures and editing rhythms according to probability rather than a predetermined narrative. Forecasting shaped both the subject and the method. The work evolved through a chain of predictions about itself. Chiptide is part of a larger series on computational foresight as social architecture and was presented during the Prijs MAP Mercator 2025 exhibition award.