Queering the Simulacrum: How Can Generative AI Video Practice Be Challenged and Elevated Through Queer Expanded Cinema

This project will investigate how queer expanded cinema can challenge and overcome the heteronormative bias of generative AI video systems through creative practice. Generative AI video systems are emerging technologies enabling new artistic expression and experimentation. However, they may also inherently reproduce the normative symbols, icons, and motifs from their training dataset, limiting the medium's expressive potential.

This project aims to expose and subvert those limitations through a practice-based study that combines critical media theory, advanced AI video research and expanded cinema arts.

Drawing on the ethos of queer filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, John Waters, and Isaac Julien, this practice-based study will develop technical and creative strategies to demystify, challenge and transgress generative AI video pipelines. These subversive strategies will include queer techniques of appropriation, pastiche, and pleasure and expanded cinema techniques of multi-screen projection, interactivity, and performance.

Drawing on these methods and the recent literature on AI aesthetics, this project will produce and evaluate new audio-visual compositions of experimental AI cinema. These works will demonstrate if such techniques can reveal and disrupt the heteronormative fantasies embedded in AI video systems and generate more diverse, poetic, and sensual alternatives.

The expected outcomes of this three-and-a-half-year project include a written thesis that critically examines the theoretical and practical implications of queer AI filmmaking and a new body of work that showcases the aesthetic potential of this experimental approach. Through an interdisciplinary methodology, this project seeks to contribute original knowledge to the fields of queer media studies, AI engineering, and the visual arts.

This project will also create impact in the creative industries by demonstrating the ethical and social value of queering AI video systems, exploring how this approach may challenge the dominant culture and outlining how this method extends the tradition of experimental media practice.