Miguel Abad Manning

Film

As a means to better understand and remedy his feelings of malaise, a young artist struggling with insomnia and loneliness begins to converse with an AI about the thoughts, visions and dreams that torment him at night.

The film is inspired by the legendary self-portrait by renowned Spanish painter Francisco de Goya, El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos (made as part of “Los Caprichos,” a series of engravings satirising 18th-century Spanish society). Accompanied by the caption: “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with reason, she is the mother of all arts,” the work suggests that when we sleep, so too do our cognitive, rational faculties, allowing imagination to run wild and giving birth to monstrous distortions of reality. It speaks not only to personal psychology, but to the collective vulnerability of a society that allows its reasoning faculties to falter.

In the spirit of this critique, this film re-contextualizes Goya’s cautionary vision in light of contemporary algorithmic culture. Based on a series of exchanges between the filmmaker and an AI over various months, the film reflects on the incongruous and toxic nature of our contemporary relationship with AI technologies and how it affects our relationship both with ourselves and others. The film portrays the stark difference between algorithmic rationality and the irrational nature of human emotions, thought and imagination, and asks: what kinds of monsters are produced when reason is outsourced to the machine; when the algorithm also begins to dream?

Miguel Abad Manning

Découvrir le profil

Born and raised in the UK, Miguel (1995) is an ethnographer, visual anthropologist and experimental filmmaker of Spanish-Irish descent based in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Miguel graduated with degrees in (BSocSci) Social Anthropology and (MA) Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester, UK. He later enrolled to study in the 7th edition of Master LAV- centre for experimental film and contemporary art in Madrid, Spain. His work takes an experimental approach to ethnographic research, investigating the relationship between humans and their environment, as well as their means of representing both themselves and “Others”. He focuses mainly on issues of ecological sustainability, human perception, metaphysics, the role of images in contemporary society, materiality of film and projection/screening of cinema as performance.

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