Humanity’s most intimate desires are continuously being stretched and shaped by artificial representations at an accelerating pace. As a result, AI imagery in contemporary society, as well as its lasting impact on future generations, is expanding the gap between real experience and artificial representations, and its impact is constantly being contemplated. As a result, the new romantic installation, ‘Kiss/Crash,’ is augmenting, subverting and negating the iconic image of the Hollywood kiss.

The interactive experience, which was directed by UK filmmaker Adam Cole, consists of three related works. The works are intertwined to employ AI-imagery to explore themes of desire and the expanding gap between real experience and artificial representations in the digital age.

Using a queer lens to appropriate a classic Hollywood aesthetic, the work places AI within the history of image-production technologies meant to incite and homogenize humanity’s desires. In the process, it reveals the nature of AI imagery and explores how people’s most intimate desires will continue to be shaped by artificial representations.

Cole crafted the immersive, multi-screen installation. Originally exhibited in London, the experience is now reproduced in the digital space. ‘Kiss/Crash’ was exhibited during last month’s SXSW, between Sunday, March 10 – Tuesday, March 12 in the Verbena Room at the Fairmont Austin. In honor of the sci-fi experimental project’s international premiere at the festival, where it won the XR Experience Special Event Audience Award, the media artist generously took the time to talk about creating and helming the piece during an exclusive interview.

The conversation began with Cole sharing why he decided to reproduce the experience in digital space, after originally exhibiting the piece in London. “I’m based up the Creative Computing Institute at the University of the Arts London. This project really came out of this research project that started when these image generating technologies were starting to become very prominent,” he shared.

“So this is around the time that DALL·E was released. Suddenly we could see how realistic and convincing these images could be, and we were also starting to come to terms with what it means to live alongside these. Generative AI models,” the director continued.

“Really this whole project was motivated by a massive anxiety around these tools. I was like, where do we go from here?,” Cole admitted.

“But luckily I was talking to my advisor, who also helped with this project. We were kind of like, we’ll do what artists have always done, which is, sort of appropriate these tools and try to make something with them,” the filmmaker shared.

“That’s more interesting – in some ways, it reveals its limitations, but it pushes the aesthetics beyond. There are examples of people doing that throughout our history, in terms of appropriating media technologies and twisting them to play with those conventions,” Cole also noted. “So the project was sort of born out of that head space and an appreciation for 20th century media artists.

“For me, there was this moment of realization that the way we talk about AI is as if this is such radically new technology. Of course it is, but the questions that it raises around authenticity, representation and truth are actually not new at all,” the media artist pointed out.

“They’re the same questions that artists have been dealing with for the past 100 years, if not longer, since we’ve been able to reproduce images at this capacity. But now we can do it at a speed and fidelity that was previously unheard of and unthinkable,” Cole continued. “So by contextualizing these tools within the history of media production, it helped give me a lens to unpack it and to work with it.

“I also come from this filmmaking background, and film is my real passion, in terms of the arts,” the helmer divulged. “So I have the sense that cinema is already formulated, right? We understand genre, especially if you take this queer media look at the history of cinema. We can see how those tools, icons and myths repeat themselves, and the interesting impact they have on audiences who consume that content.

“So the idea and question of this piece is, in many ways, how are those cinematic icons and images of desire a part of the very way that,these machines work? Also, what are the consequences for perpetuating those icons into the future,?” Cole questioned.

“We talk about these tools in an abstract way, but how are they going to impact our most intimate experiences? We know that images have that ability,” the director also pointed out.

Further speaking about desire, Cole then delved into how he chose to focus on, and ultimately blended, those themes in ‘Kiss/Crash.’ “So as I said, coming in with this film background and as a queer person, I grew up watching these movies. I was somewhat obsessed with going to the movies growing up. But there’s this complicated relationship we have to that experience. I would willingly go into these cinemas and watch almost exclusively heterosexual couples fall in love again and again in a coffee shop.

“So it was always quite alluring, arousing and glamorous, but it also created a sense of friction. There were limits to how much I could relate to, of course,” the filmmaker noted.

“While it comes from this queer perspective, I don’t think it’s really limited to a queer audience because everyone can’t match up to those images, right? Even the actors themselves don’t really look like their 30-foot projection on a screen,” Cole pointed out.

“We already live in the shadow of artificial representations. That has real consequences for our sense of identity and the structure of our desires. The way we navigate that friction determines a lot of our experience in the world,” the media artist emphasized.

“So that is sort of how it comes together. I hope it kind of approaches the complexity of these images. They are beautifully poetic, but they also have this kind of insidious possibility to them. That can be quite poisonous, if we’re not aware of the way it works on our own identities,” Cole added.

Continuing on about the images that are included in ‘Kiss/Crash,’ the helmer then shared how he decided which photos to feature in the piece. “So I think something the interesting thing about working with AI is leaning into the things that it’s really good at, which is variation and style. So you can mimic almost any style and you can make thousands of copies of it.

“So it was an understanding of those affordances with this technology that you can’t do with any other filmmaking process that I’m aware of,” Cole added.

“So it really tries to move through a massive amount of cinematic history. If you look at the central video, with these really classic Hitchcock style romances, it’s in color, but it feels very nostalgic,” the director pointed out.

“As the video progresses, it becomes more and more contemporary, and draws more and more on a very familiar aesthetic. So one of the scenes has sort of a Frenching wave vibe. One of them has an American independent vibe, and an American Hollywood vibe as well,” Cole shared.

“As it continues, it starts to pull in more genre as well that maybe don’t really make sense. So it starts to become a bit more violent, and we get some of scenes that you would see in a horror film, and not in romance films,” the filmmaker shared.

“So it’s mixing these genres so quickly that there’s a slippage of context. You realize all the ways that these images exist across so much of our media landscape, and how saturated we are with those images. So that’s in the central video,” Cole divulged.

“Then on the video on the side, it takes a similar approach, but it also draws on really iconic, cinematic couples. So it also starts with a very classic Hollywood expression, but it moves into more central expressions and then into political celebrities and religious iconography – any of the images that we are kind of numb to, but that we’re constantly consuming,” the media artist added.

Further speaking about incorporating the different genres and a classic and modern Hollywood aesthetic into ‘Kiss/Crash’ through a queer lens, Cole further delved into how he blended genres during the production. “I hope one thing that is quite evident is that the project, in some ways, is a real labor of love. I’m critiquing cinema, but it comes from a place of admiration.

“So to create these images, I had to create data sets to train a model. In those data sets, I pulled from various classic cinematic, films, from classic Hollywood, like ‘Casablanca,’ and even other movies from the ’30s and ’40s,” the helmer shared.

“Then I created models that were more contemporary, with the most classic Hollywood examples being ‘The Notebook.’ I used these images of romance that are so culturally embedded, both in these models and across our collective conscience,” Cole shared.

“So moving across genres and time periods was a way to draw the line across all these different styles and create that history in real time. We were able to express how those images build on each other and how that’s going to continue with this new generation of AI tools,” the director noted.

“There are already predictions that over 70 percent of content online will be AI generated in the next five to 10 years. So we know it’s happening and it will have consequences. So I think understanding how it fits into visual history is a really worthwhile task,” Cole added.

The filmmaker then shared how he created the installation’s artificially generated imagery to explore its themes, in terms of its cinematography. “So getting the right shot is really interesting with AI because there is inherently an element of randomness. I may be a filmmaker who does narrative film, but you can’t plan for every single thing.

“But with machine learning, there is just as part of the way it works that you don’t know exactly what you’re going to get out of it. So there’s always this balance of control and freedom,” Cole noted.

“There are many ways we can control the outputs of our work.

So that includes training your own models and the prompts that you give it. It also includes forms of image manipulation and image translation,” Cole also shared. “So it’s about putting on the right controls to get results that you’re happy with.

So it was a very long process and it was a lot of experimentation and technical research outside.

“So it’s really a project that blends technology and art, and it’s one of the reasons it’s so exciting to bring it to the XR Film Festival. I think that’s exactly the sort of audience who appreciates the merge of those two processes that are often quite siloed,” the media artist divulged.

Following up on bringing ‘Kiss/Crash’ on the festival circuit, Cole shared his excitement that the project had its international premiere in the XR Experience Special Event section at SXSW. He shared that he couldn’t have been more excited for it be shared at the Austin-based festival. “As a personal achievement, it’s of course a dream come true to have that kind of audience of people who are really engaged.

“But I also really believe in the project and I really believe in the work. I’m lucky to have exhibited it, so I know that audience is connect with it,” the helmer divulged.

Cole added that he thought ‘Kiss/Crash’s international premiere at SXSW would “be something really special. AI is the central topic that we won’t shut up about. But I find the conversation around it to be quite abstract and opaque.

“I think this work is a really powerful way to recenter it around us personally, and the real impact it’s going to have on things that we consider very private. So I (wanted) it to really start a conversation, and (hoped) that it has an impact while” it was presented at SXSW, he concluded.