Report 5923

Hannah Cobb

Artwork Description:

Report 5923 is an hour-long sci-fi film predominantly made using generative AI and a wide array of different tools and methods. The film follows the protagonist, Shevek, on her journey between three different planets–Anarres, Methic and Odonia–whilst compiling an ethnographic report. Sound, sonic warfare and audio-as-virus are reoccurring themes throughout the story, which more broadly deals with notions of world-building and techno-optimism. The work attempts to deploy ideas we have come across in philosophical and theoretical works that we love; particularly those of Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. It was first presented as a work-in-progress for FACT, a gallery and cinema in Liverpool, UK, who asked us to present work at the end of a two-day workshop in June ’23 dedicated to supporting artists, researchers and curators. The programme—titled ‘Turning Together’—took its name from speculative fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin’s understanding of the ‘mother-tongue’ as a way of communicating rooted in listening and relating to one another. This idea of relation through linguistic interaction sparked our thinking about the relation between human and machine; the development of Large Language Models, the language of prompts, and ultimately the notion of a conversation between naturally and artificially intelligent forms. Report 5923 is an amalgam of neural networks arranged to form a narrative feature film.