Just stumbled upon this image of our film Air Kiss screened at the Deptford Moving Image Festival in London in 2019. Phew, those were the times. The film was produced during our time as part of “The New Normal,” a think tank at Strelka Institute, directed by Benjamin Bratton.
Air Kiss was a collaborative effort between Alina Kvirkveliya, Pxkkx, Karina Golubenko, and myself. Created in 2017, the film is an HD 19-minute and 38-second piece accompanied by a website and book.
Air Kiss explores a near future where governance is largely outsourced to artificial intelligence. The film presents a speculative strategy unfolding the mechanisms of a decentralized AI-governance system. The social, political, cultural, and spatial repercussions of these projected developments are vast.
What does it mean to live in a world where computation is the surrounding matter itself? When algorithms predict, suggest, decide, analyze, and manage everything from basic income to infrastructure and even one’s inner dialogue, what are the limits of personal responsibility or personality?
The film envisions a system striving to be a universally fair real-time democracy. Users continuously poll their preferences about their living environments, influencing the algorithmic system both by deliberate virtual requests and behavior tracking. This shapes the design and management of cities and geographies beyond them.
