Alexander Kluge The Dragonfly s Eye My Virtual Camera AI

The figurehead of New German Cinema meditates on the next leap forward in visual aesthetics

In The Dragonfly's Eye, author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge (born 1932) tests out the cooperative capacities of the Stable Diffusion model, which uses AI to process images. As a filmmaker, he has years of experience dealing with the camera and its ways of seeing. As a result, he is particularly curious about the different images that AI can generate. Here, Kluge reflects on the idiosyncrasies of these new types of images, in which chance factors and errors create subjective forms, resulting in open images that are hard to place. He establishes rules for using the "virtual camera" and thus contributes to a debate on how AI should be handled. In a series of stories combining images and text--ranging from cases of phantom pregnancy in East Germany to the mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin--he examines how the "virtual camera" uncovers a new lens within which stories can be framed.