Dreams of Vending Machines by Elisa Duca

Dreams of Vending Machines

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What do objects do when they stop functioning in the flux of human-made everyday life? What do they dream of? In my video, AI summons the agency of vending machines into a synthetic dreamscape of urban loneliness. In a city ruled by humans, the machines dream of release—of shedding purpose, of drifting into pure flow. They dream of fluids, of currents, of motion without obligation. In dreaming, they fracture, subvert and queer the city’s rigid self-image, unsettling its power structures. They turn into agents of disruption. Obstacles. The videos were created in collaboration with Runway and Kling-AI. Some of the images were previously generated with Midjourney. Image and prompt material come from my research archive—mostly drawn from Tokyo, Hong Kong, Berlin, and somewhere in between. Since 2022, I’ve been using AI in my multimedia practice as a tool for collaborating with non-human forms of agency. This is a continuation of my earlier explorations with analog materials, processes, and forces that carried their own unpredictability. AI image and video generation became a natural extension of this dialogue, carrying my engagement with material otherness into the digital and computational realm. In my approach, AI becomes a co-creator that reorganizes and reimagines past data into speculative visions of possible futures, opening space for radical imagination—a way to think together with an Otherness that transcends being human. I have been consistently working on queering AI from the beginning, training and feeding it in a non-normative way, seeking the strange, the odd, the glitchy—actively looking for what lies beyond the mainstream polish baked into AI.

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video art
generative art