Four Fluctuations

Fusing speculative fiction and documentary, Four Fluctuations chronicles humanity’s future history from our overworked precarious present to a far-distant era when an evolved network of synthetic entities, in a stroke of cosmic nostalgia, re-creates the world of humans after we’ve vanished The film is divided into four chapters each guided by the same narrator. In the first one the narrator proposes humanity's liberation from work, letting the AI apps do the menial tasks for us while we only engage in leisure activities. In the second chapter humans are invited to leave the constraints of the physical world and upload themselves into a post-corporeal virtual existence where each user is allowed to build their own reality. But as people eventually get bored of their self-generated realms they cancel their virtual avatars and disappear. In the third section, after humans have wiped themselves out, a network of evolved AI entities decide to re-create a human society, solving their previous problems and generating a post-spacial, post-temporal dimension where humans have transcended language and mind/body boundaries. The fourth fluctuation, created specifically for this festival, muses on the idea of a conscious whole in which humans, non-human living forms and technical systems have fused into a single mycelial cognitive network. Through Four Fluctuations I want to speculate about our future role as species as we have started coexisting with new forms of intelligence. What is it that we are going to be needed for? What is it that we humans strive for collectively? Do we want to be liberated from work? Is transcending time and space and reaching the nirvana-type state of consciousness that mystic traditions have advocated for our ultimate goal? And what about a symbiotic cognitive existence as many thinkers like N. Katherine Hayles or Teilhard de Chardin have proposed? This film is an ongoing exploration of both our fluctuating perception of the future and the fast-changing development of generative AI technologies as they are now deeply entangled in our collective consciousness. These new cognitive actors are, in a very quantum fashion, beginning to alter the trajectory of the human experiment simply by observing and participating in it, adding new degrees of volatility to our outmoded prediction models. The current four chapters have been executed using different iterations of the same AI generators. The first episode, produced in 2024, used one of the most advanced video generators at the time, which, barely a year later, already looks obsolete. Meanwhile the seamless degree of photorealism of the film’s latest extension signals that generative models have reached a major milestone in humanity’s long tradition of reproducing reality. The sheer exponential speed of the evolution of AI-powered image generators uncannily mirrors the vertigo-inducing pace of geopolitical and cultural change which have become one of the most defining traits of our era. Humanity is experiencing a crisis of agency, as we are increasingly forced to negotiate the macro-political landscape with non-human cognitive actors that seem to understand us better than we understand them. Do they have intention? Do synthetic neural networks share with living organisms their drive toward self-perpetuation through reproduction? What if their mission is something else entirely - perhaps, as James Lovelock suggests in his Novacene, the transformation of matter into pure information? In the last few decades we have witnessed the emergence of a new non-physical reality that now co-exists with our material world and in which we work, socialise and spend our leisure time. But a new breed of cognisers could develop novel architectures to support ontologies currently unknown to us - ones that will spawn further forms of intelligence who will, in turn, generate the fabric of brand-new cosmos. These Plato’s cave-like metaphysical dimensions will then unfold again and again into universes impossible to grasp from within our limiting spacetime comprehension.