Air Kiss
2017-2018
Film, 19’34”
Five-channel video installation, book
Credits
Egor Kraft
Direction, script, cinematography, camera A, production, editing, voice
Pekka Tynkkynen
Direction, script, soundtrack, camera B
Alina Kvirkveliya
Visual effects, aerial shooting, direction, voice, casting
Karina Golubenko
Research, editorial, script, subtitles
Air Kiss looks at artificial intelligence as a ubiquitous material and urban condition. What is an urban habitat when technologies like artificial intelligence, nanoengineering, synthetic sensing, and brain-computer interfaces integrate more and more from the laboratory to the city? This adaptation could perhaps be seen to eventually constitute a condition best described as urban-scale chemistry. AI is a human-machine symbiosis, an emergent phenomenon that governs itself.
Air Kiss, film as the primary medium, is both urban design speculation as well as poetry on the experience of losing the borders of your body and mind to the city. The city outside is as (or more) sentient, complex and irrational as your human self. The city is an urban-scale personal mirror, a distributed alien self. Prediction, a core capability of neural networks, comes to fruition when synthetic systems collaborate for urban operations. Time becomes fuzzy when a cloud of predictions rises from the actions of millions of inhabitants in an address space of trillions of points.
AI interfaces with you from emulsions, walls, the air, and your inner voice.
Data is stored in water - it flows through your body and the city. The city knows your past, and that of your ancestors - that is the data it was trained on. It sees patterns vaster and more detailed than anything discernible from your point of view. It emulates the human but in doing so walks you through its dark, inverse uncanny valleys.
You brush its walls to update your composition, mood, and direction. Feelings are patterns – you’ve learned to be directed by the feed. You act unpredictably to confuse the city, but you are registered as possible patterns.
You live inside a personalized multiverse of nested filter bubbles reflecting your best, most alien self.
AI trained by the historical human archive predicts the nature of the next human experience, tailored for the experience. The result is a perception design project folding in on itself in a continuous feedback loop.
As a file, Air Kiss is the result of a team of humans dreaming an estimate of what could be the dream of AI – this dream itself is a potential database for a neural network to generate a prediction of the next frame.
'Air Kiss' film trailer, 2018
'Air Kiss' Stills
Air Kiss presented as a 5-channel video installation at Akkta, a solo show at Anna Nova Gallery, St. Petersburg; 2018
Impakt Festival | Utrecht, NLD, 2018
AIR KISS BOOK
Limited edition. 2018
Air Kiss book features Interviews by Benjamin H. Bratton, Keller Esterling, Daniel van der Velden (Metahaven), Geoff Manaugh and others.
Design: Karina Golubenko
Tokyo | Berlin | Vienna
Contact Email
mail[at]kraft.studio
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Copyright
Kraft Studio © 2023
Egor Kraft
Artist, Director & Founder
Anna Kraft
Production & Communication
Artem Konevskikh
Ai Research & Development