Join us for an online talk/screening of AI Jetée, with Adrian Goycoolea at 14:00, 18th February 2026. This is part of the CRAIL pilot programme (convened by Tim Fransen and Marie-Josiane Agossou). More details here.
AI Jetée is a shot-by-shot, generative AI reconstruction of Chris Marker’s seminal 1962 photo-roman, La Jetée. By utilising AI to synthesise the film’s visual, sonic, and narrative components, the project interrogates the boundaries of authenticity and authorship in the age of algorithmic production. The resulting work leans into the inherent “hallucinations” of the technology—such as the fluid morphing of character identities and surreal visual glitches—to frame the AI’s unpredictability as a dreamlike expansion of Marker’s original themes of fragmented memory and temporal instability.
This project provides a sophisticated meta-commentary on the instability of the image. By applying generative tools to a film composed of frozen moments, it exposes the tension between the historical archive and the AI’s status as a pure simulacrum: a synthetic output that precedes its own reality. Rather than a mere copy, the AI produces a hyperreal interpretation that exists entirely within the latent space of its training data, challenging our understanding of cultural memory and cinematic legacy in an era where the distinction between the biological and the synthesised is increasingly blurred.
Adrian Goycoolea is a practice-based researcher and Senior Lecturer in Filmmaking at the University of Sussex. His work intersects documentary, experimental film theory, queer studies, and the ethical applications of generative AI. His films explore how moving-image production connects personal memory with contested political histories and emerging technologies.