Created for Melbourne Design Week 2026 to showcase the use of AI in creative disciplines, ‘underLYING’ addresses the outcomes and dangers of unrestrained AI systems self-automation.
‘underLYING’ (2026) interrogates the emergent conditions of image production within an era increasingly shaped by AI-driven automation. Structured around the apparent conceit of an unseen operator, ‘Agent O.’, the work initially presents a system governed by intention and procedural logic. However, this perceived authorship rapidly destabilises as the sequence accelerates, giving way to an unbounded proliferation of synthetic imagery that resists coherence and overwhelms perceptual thresholds.
Through its escalating tempo and density, the piece constructs a deliberately disorienting and austere audiovisual field. Images and sounds emerge not as carriers of meaning, but as outputs of an indifferent process—assembled, dissolved, and recombined within a continuous feedback loop. In this context, the work presents the fundamentally ahuman character of machine-led generation, wherein affect, memory, and embodied experience are absent, yet simulated at scale.
The work examines the shifting relationship between human intention and generative systems, assembling fragments of AI-generated moving image into an increasingly accelerated and disorienting audiovisual composition. As imagery proliferates and coherence begins to fracture, the work asks whether generative technologies extend human creative agency—or gradually abstract creation into processes increasingly removed from human experience.
Shortly before its scheduled exhibition at Monash University Caulfield Library, underLYING was flagged as containing sequences of rapidly flashing imagery that presented a potential risk to photosensitive viewers. Meeting the venue’s screening requirements would have required substantial removal of these sequences. As their escalating visual intensity was integral to the conceptual and temporal structure of the work, I chose to withdraw it rather than exhibit a significantly altered version.
The work consequently remains an independent audiovisual piece in its originally intended form.
WARNING: underLYING contains rapidly flashing and strobing imagery and may not be suitable for viewers with photosensitive epilepsy or other sensitivities to flashing visual content.
Experience in fullscreen 4K here.
Surround sound speakers or earphones are recommended.
giosuè prochilo 