Daniel Binns is a media theorist and filmmaker tinkering with the weird edges of technology, storytelling, and screen culture. He is the author of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age and currently writes about posthuman poetics, glitchy machines, and speculative media worlds.
‘Vapourwave Hall’, generated by me using Leonardo.Ai.
This is a little late, as the article was actually released back in November, but due to swearing off work for a month over December and into the new year, I thought I’d hold off on posting here.
This piece, ‘The Allure of Artificial Worlds‘, is my first small contribution to AI research — specifically, I look here at how the visions conjured by image and video generators might be considered their own kinds of worlds. There is a nod here, as well, to ‘simulative AI’, also known as agentic AI, which many feel may be the successor to generative AI tools operating singularly. We’ll see.
Abstract
With generative AI (genAI) and its outputs, visual and aural cultures are grappling with new practices in storytelling, artistic expression, and meme-farming. Some artists and commentators sit firmly on the critical side of the discourse, citing valid concerns around utility, longevity, and ethics. But more spurious judgements abound, particularly when it comes to quality and artistic value.
This article presents and explores AI-generated audiovisual media and AI-driven simulative systems as worlds: virtual technocultural composites, assemblages of material and meaning. In doing so, this piece seeks to consider how new genAI expressions and applications challenge traditional notions of narrative, immersion, and reality. What ‘worlds’ do these synthetic media hint at or create? And by what processes of visualisation, mediation, and aisthesis do they operate on the viewer? This piece proposes that these AI worlds offer a glimpse of a future aesthetic, where the lines between authentic and artificial are blurred, and the human and the machinic are irrevocably enmeshed across society and culture. Where the uncanny is not the exception, but the rule.
Up until this year, AI-generated video was something of a white whale for tech developers. Early experiments resulted in janky-looking acid dream GIFs; vaguely recognisable frames and figures, but nothing in terms of consistent, logical motion. Then things started to get a little, or rather a lot, better. Through constant experimentation and development, the nerds (and I use this term in a nice way) managed to get the machines (and I use this term in a knowingly reductive way) to produce little videos that could have been clips from a film or a human-made animation. To reduce thousands of hours of math and programming into a pithy quotable, the key was this: they encoded time.
RunwayML and Leonardo.Ai are probably the current forerunners in the space, allowing text-to-image-to-(short)video as a seamless user-driven process. RunwayML also offers text-to-audio generation, which you can then use to generate an animated avatar speaking those words; this avatar can be yourself, another real human, a generated image, or something else entirely. There’s also Pika, Genmo and many others offering variations on this theme.
Earlier this year, OpenAI announced Sora, their video generation tool. One assumes this will be built into ChatGPT, the chatbot which is serving as the interface for other OpenAI products like DALL-E and custom GPTs. The published results of Sora are pretty staggering, though it’s an open secret that these samples were chosen from many not-so-great results. Critics have also noted that even the supposed exemplars have their flaws. Similar things were said about image generators only a few years ago, though, so one assumes that the current state of things is the worst it will ever be.
Creators are now experimenting with AI films. The aforementioned RunwayML is currently running their second AI Film Festival in New York. Many AI films are little better than abstract pieces that lack the dynamism and consideration to be called even avant-garde. However, there are a handful that manage to transcend their technical origins. But how this is not true of all media, all art, manages to elude critics and commentators, and worst of all, my fellow scholars.
It is currently possible, of course, to use AI tools to generate most components, and even to compile found footage into a complete video. But this is an unreliable method that offers little of the creative control that filmmakers might wish for. Creators employ an infinite variety of different tools, workflows, and methods. The simplest might prompt ChatGPT with an idea, ask for a fleshed-out treatment, and then use other tools to generate or source audiovisual material that the user then edits in software like Resolve, Final Cut or Premiere. Others build on this post-production workflow by generating music with Suno or Udio; or they might compose music themselves and have it played by an AI band or orchestra.
As with everything, though, the tools don’t matter. If the finished product doesn’t have a coherent narrative, theme, or idea, it remains a muddle of modes and outputs that offers nothing to the viewer. ChatGPT may generate some poetic ideas on a theme for you, but you still have to do the cognitive work of fleshing that out, sourcing your media, arranging that media (or guiding a tool to do it for you). Depending on what you cede to the machine, you may or may not be happy with the result — cue more refining, revisiting, more processing, more thinking.
AI can probably replace us humans for low-stakes media-making, sure. Copywriting, social media ads and posts, the nebulous corporate guff that comprises most of the dead internet. For AI video, the missing component of the formula was time. But for AI film, time-based AI media of any meaning or consequence, encoding time was just the beginning.
AI media won’t last as a genre or format. Call that wild speculation if you like, but I’m pretty confident in stating it. AI media isn’t a fad, though, I think, in the same ways that blockchain and NFTs were. AI media is showing itself to be a capable content creator and creative collaborator; events like the AI Film Festival are how these tools test and prove themselves in this regard. To choose a handy analogue, the original ‘film’ — celluloid exposed to light to capture an image — still exists. But that format is distinct from film as a form. It’s distinct from film as a cultural idea. From film as a meme or filter. Film, somehow, remains a complex cultural assemblage of technical, social, material and cultural phenomena. Following that historical logic, I don’t think AI media will last in its current technical or cultural form. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be on it right now: quite the opposite, in fact. But to do that, don’t look to the past, or to textbooks, or even to people like me, to be honest. Look to the true creators: the tinkerers, the experimenters, what Apple might once have called the crazy ones.
Creators and artists have always pushed the boundaries, have always guessed at what matters and what doesn’t, have always shared those guesses with the rest of us. Invariably, those guesses miss some of the mark, but taken collectively they give a good sense of a probable direction. That instinct to take wild stabs is something that LLMs, even a General Artificial Intelligence, will never be truly capable of. Similarly, the complexity of something like, for instance, a novel, or a feature film, eludes these technologies. The ways the tools become embedded, the ways the tools are treated or rejected, the ways they become social or cultural; that’s not for AI tools to do. That’s on us. Anyway, right now AI media is obsessed with its own nature and role in the world; it’s little better than a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey or Her. But like those films and countless other media objects, it does itself show us some of the ways we might either lean in to the change, or purposefully resist it. Any thoughts here on your own uses are very welcome!
The creative and scientific methods blend in a fascinating way with AI media. Developers build tools that do a handful of things; users then learn to daisy-chain those tools together in personal workflows that suit their ideas and processes. To be truly innovative, creators will develop bold and strong original ideas (themes, stories, experiences), and then leverage their workflows to produce those ideas. It’s not just AI media. It’s AI media folded into everything else we already do, use, produce. That’s where the rubber meets the road, so to speak; where a tool or technique becomes the culture. That’s how it worked with printing and publishing, cinema and TV, computers, the internet, and that’s how it will work with AI. That’s where we’re headed. It’s not the singularity. It’s not the end of the world. it’s far more boring and fascinating than either of those could ever hope to be.
If you like what’s going on here at The Clockwork Penguin, if you appreciate the cut of my particular jib, as it were, buy me a coffee!
Godzilla with the spicy lightning as depicted in Godzilla vs. Kong (2021).
The 2014 reboot/continuation/expansion of the Godzilla franchise opens with the standard mystery box. A helicopter flies low over a jungle landscape, there are low minor chords from a rumbling orchestra: dissonance, uncertainty, menace. Helicopter Passenger #1 turns to Helicopter Passenger #2: “They found something.”
This is the germ of what is now a multi-film franchise, with a spin-off TV series that debuted in late 2023. A few weeks ago, I re-watched Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot, as well as the sequel films I hadn’t seen, Godzilla II: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong.
It was a bit of fun, obviously, a last hurrah before I went back to the very serious business of media academicking, but as is wont to happen, it’s been stewing ever since. So here: have some little thoughts on big monsters.
Last week I Masta’d1 up some speculations as to why Argylle has flopped. The first and most obvious reason that a film might tank is that it’s just not a very good film, as this may well be true of Argylle. But in a time where cinema is dead and buried and a media object is never discrete, we can’t look at the film in a vacuum.
I have thoughts on why #Argylle flopped. I haven’t seen it, so I won’t go into any great depth, but suffice to say there are two major components:
1) Marvel killed transmedia storytelling, jumped around on the corpse, drove a steamroller over it, then buried it in a nuclear waste facility.
2) Camp doesn’t hit like it used to. Big ensemble campy treats aren’t as sweet now; in an age of hyper-sensitivity, broad knowledge and information access, they taste a little sour. Ain’t no subtext anymore.2
The marketing machine behind Argylle decided they’d play a little game, by teasing a novel written by a mystery author (both in terms of them not being well-known, but also an author of actual mystery), with the film being quickly picked up for production. This was fairly clumsily-done, but leaving that to one side: okay, cool idea. The conceit is that the author runs into the real-life equivalent of one of their characters who whisks them away on an adventure. Cue ideas of unreliable narration, possible brainwashing, or whatever, and there’s the neat little package.
The concept overall is solid, but Universal and Apple made the mistake of thinking they could shoehorn this concept into a campaign that ‘tricked’ the audience into thinking some of it was factual, or at least had some tenuous crossover with reality.
Basically, they tried an old-school transmedia campaign.
Transmedia storytelling has always been around in some form or another. It dovetails quite nicely with epistolary and experimental narratives, like Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein, and discussions of transmedia also work well when you’re thinking about serial stories or adaptations. The term is most often attributed to Henry Jenkins, a wonderful and kindly elder scholar who was thinking about the huge convergence of media technologies occasioned by the wide adoption of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Jenkins’ ur-example of transmedia is The Matrix franchise, “a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium.”3 The idea is that in order to truly appreciate the narrative as a whole, the audience has to follow up on all the elements, be they films, video games, comic books, or whatever.
“Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa. Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole. Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption.”4
This model is now far from unique in terms of marketing or storytelling; with the MCU, DC Universe, the Disneyfied Star Wars universe and others, we have no dearth of complex narratives and storyworlds to choose from. This is maybe now partly why transmedia is seen as, at best, a little dated, old hat, and at worst, a bit of a dirty word, when it comes to narrative, media, or cinema studies. Those still chipping away at the transmedia stoneface are seen as living in the past or worse, wasting their time. I don’t think it’s a waste of time, nor do I necessarily see it as living in the past; it’s just that transmedia is media now.
Every new media commodity, be it a film, an app, a game, a platform, novel, has a web of attendant media commodities spring up around it. Mostly these are used for marketing, but occasionally these extraneous texts may relay some plot point or narrative element. The issue is that you need to conceit to be front and centre, you need some idea of the full narrative; you can’t expect the audience to want to do anything. The producers of Argylle made this mistake. They did transmedia the old-fashioned way, where narrative elements are spread across discrete media objects (e.g. book and film), and they expected the audience to want to fill in the gaps, and to share their excitement at having done so… on social media, I guess?
But like transmedia storytelling, social media ain’t what she used to be. Our present internet is fragmented, hyper-platformed, paywalled; city-states competing for dominance, for annexation (acquisition), for citizens or slaves (subscribers). Content is still king, but the patrician’s coffers care not as to whether that content is produced by the finest scribes of the age, or the merchant guild’s new automatons.
Viral is still viral, popular is still popular, but the propagation of content moves differently. Hashtags, likes, views don’t mean much anymore. You want people talking, but you only care as much as it gets new people to join your platform or your service. Get new citizens inside the gates, then lock and bar the gates behind them; go back to the drawing board for the next big campaign. The long tail is no more; what matters is flash in the pan attention attacks.
The producers behind the Godzilla reboot clearly envisioned a franchise. This is clear enough from how the film ends (or more accurately, where it stops talking, and the credits are permitted to roll). Godzilla apparently saves the world (or at least Honolulu and Las Vegas) from another giant monster, then disappears into the sea, leaving humanity to speculate as to its motivations.
It’s also apparent that the filmmakers didn’t want a clean break from the cultural history, themes or value of the broader Godzilla oeuvre; the title sequence suggests that the 1954 Castle Bravo tests were actually an operation to destroy Godzilla5. And in the film’s prologue, this wonderful shot is presented with virtually no context.
American triumphalism meets Japanese… er, monster promotions?
What struck me most, though, is the lack of overt story-bridges, particularly in the first film. Story-bridges are parts of the plot, e.g. characters, events, images, that allow the audience to jump off to another part of the narrative. These jumping-off points can be explicit, e.g. an end-credits sequence, or a line of dialogue referring to a past/future event, or they can be implied, e.g. the introduction of a character in a minor role that may participate more prominently in other media.
As media franchises become more complex, these points/bridges are not as often modelled as connecting branches to nodes around a centred point (a tentpole film, for instance), but as a mesh that connects multiple, interconnected tentpole media. In some of my academic work, with my colleagues Vashanth Selvadurai and Peter Vistisen, we’ve explored how Marvel attempts to balance this complexity:
“[Marvel] carefully balances production by generating self-contained stories for the mass audience, which include moments of interconnectivity in some scenes to fortify the MCU and thereby accommodate the fan base… [T]he gradual scaling up in bridge complexity from characters to storyworld to a cohesive storyline is integrated into a polycentric universe of individual transmedia products. These elements are not gathered around one tentpole event that the audience has to experience before being able to make sense of the rest.”4
In Godzilla, the story-bridges are more thematic, even tonal. The story remains consistently about humanity’s desire to control the natural world, and that world’s steadfast resistance to control; multiple times we hear the scientist Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) speak about ‘balance’ in nature, the idea of a natural equilibrium that humanity has upset, and that Godzilla and his kin will restore. There is also a balance within and between humanity; corporate greed, political power struggles, individual freedoms and restrictions, all vie to find a similar kind of equilibrium, if such a thing is possible. The resulting tone is one that feels universal but prescient; topical and relevant to the contemporary moment, despite the presence of enormous monsters.
This tone is carried over into Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The monsters multiply in this instalment, and an extraterrestrial element is introduced, but in general Godzilla’s animal motivation is about preservation of self, but also of Earth and its biology. I should also note that there are more explicit bridges in this film, like the characters of Dr. Serizawa and his colleague Dr. Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins). But the true connecting thread, at least for me, is this repeated theme of humans and our puny power struggles playing out against the backdrop of a deep time, a history, forces and powers so ancient that we can never really understand them.
This macro-bridge, if you like, allows the filmmakers to then make tweaks to the micro-elements of the story. If they want or need to adjust the character focus, they can. If the plot of a single film seems a little rote, maybe, or they want to try something different, they’ve given themselves enough space in the story and the story-world to do that. This may not necessarily be intentional, but it certainly appears as an effective counter-model to the MCU/Disney mode, where everything seems over-complicated and planned out in multi-year phases, and everything is so locked in. The MonsterVerse approach is one of ad hoc franchise storytelling, and the result is a universe that feels more free, more open: full of possibilities and untold stories.
The point of all of this, I suppose, is to let us see what works and what doesn’t. As a storyteller or creative type, it helps me to model and test approaches to storytelling of all scales and budgets, as I think about what kinds of narratives I want to develop, and in which media form. Beyond that, though, I think that as we move into a contentscape that muddles the human-made with the computer-generated, this kind of analysis and discussion is more essential than ever.
Notes & References
Still working out the vernacular for the new social web. ↩︎
The first Godzilla film, directed by Ishirō Honda, was also released in 1954 ↩︎
Selvadurai, V., Vistisen, P., & Binns, D. (2022). Bridge Complexity as a Factor in Audience Interaction in Transmedia Storytelling. Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, 7(1), 85–108 (quote from pages 96-7). https://doi.org/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.7.1.0085↩︎
A long-gestating piece of research has just been published in the Global Media Journal — Australian Edition. This piece emerged from a day of field-work conducted with the Posthumanities Reading Group from RMIT, under the stewardship of the late and much-missed Adrian Miles. The day was held in February 2017 at Pound Bend on the Yarra River, about 45 minutes north-east of the Melbourne CBD. Almost exactly a year later, on 5 February 2018, Adrian passed away while riding his beloved bike in the bush near Kinglake.
This piece is dedicated to Adrian, and his short but enormous influence on my thinking and approach to academic life.
How does it feel to make media? What goes through the filmmaker’s head right at the moment they hit ‘record’? What are the processes – mechanical, digital, physical, psychological – that occur before, during, and after the recording of sound or vision? Building on the recent embodied turn in screen production research and taking inspiration from core ideas of the new materialists, this experimental piece unfolds in two parts.
Part one takes the form of stream of consciousness writing in retort to quotes or ideas from new materialist thinkers like Andrew Pickering and Kathleen Stewart, and a reflection on one’s own media practice. The result of this is two recipes for a kind of embodied making, which were then put into practice with two pieces of media, The Yarra & I and Pieces of Pound Bend. An extended second part connects reflections on this practice to writing on cinema and time, primarily Gilles Deleuze and Jean Epstein.
This work examines where the maker fits in the nebula of media texts, tools, and technologies. What is the point of making media or – perhaps more aptly – when?
Here’s the reading list I put together to remember Adrian, and my colleague Adrian Danks’ touching tribute.
The digital (PDF/EPUB) version of my new book Material Media-Making in the Digital Age is available now! Head to the Intellect site to purchase (or tell your institution’s library to do so!).
Exciting!
The cover of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age.
From the blurb:
“How might one craft a personal media-making practice that is thoughtful and considerate of the tools and materials at one’s disposal? This is the core question of this original new book. Exploring a number of media-making tools and processes like drones and vlogging, as well as thinking through time, editing, sound, and the stream, Binns looks out over the current media landscape in order to understand his own media practice.”
Her language contains elements from Aeolic vernacular and poetic tradition, with traces of epic vocabulary familiar to readers of Homer. She has the ability to judge critically her own ecstasies and grief, and her emotions lose nothing of their force by being recollected in tranquillity.
