Artificial Imagination and Fiction After Cinema – SXSW, Austin

This conference examines how AI, beyond cost reduction and visual effects, inaugurates a post-photographic rupture. Cinema’s factuality—rooted in photographic capture of what was—confronts AI’s counterfactuality: statistical generation of what could be, freed from indexical constraints. After metabolizing cinematic language, AI opens unprecedented fictional territories: evolving generative narratives, multiversal storytelling, dissolution of boundaries between creation and reception. We explore these new fictions that transcend filming constraints and classical narration, revealing how counterfactual generation catalyzes an anthropological mutation of our fictional regimes, and a means of resistance to the dissolution of common truth.