DREAM FACTORY by the Posthuman Cinema Collective, explores how artists and machines might improvise together—composing atmospheres, voices, and bodies that neither could make alone
- Jan 19
- 3 min read
Updated: Feb 8
The Posthuman Cinema Collective Mark Amerika, Will Luers, and Chad Mossholder, return with their most ambitious work, DREAM FACTORY, a long-form video that summons apparitions into presence: gesturing, posing, and speaking across the screen's spectral plane.
Following international exhibitions of their breakout collaboration Posthuman Cinema at venues including the International Biennale of Digital Art in Montreal, the Noise Art Fair with Kate Vass Galerie in Istanbul, Noorderlicht in Groningen, the Bergen International Film Festival, and Gallery 120710 in Berkeley, the collective expands its improvisational practice by reimagining Andy Warhol’s Factory as a digital séance-fiction, replacing the 16mm camera with the algorithmic gaze of generative systems.
The process unfolds as a live, improvisational performance—a call-and-response in which language is used to coax forth figures from the latent space, producing a new kind of “Screen Test” for subjects that never existed. Each tableau deliberately blurs the line between artifice and reality, updating Warhol’s exploration of persona for a networked, dislocated age.
DREAM FACTORY unfolds across five movements, beginning with the literal making of AI models as they imagine themselves into embodied existence and culminating in these entities becoming jaded Superstars speaking directly to viewers. Throughout, BAFTA-nominated sound designer Chad Mossholder's evolving ambient soundtrack runs parallel to the images, voiceover, and artificial voices, creating a layered sonic landscape.
The work traces a complete evolution: from foundational "apparitions" constructing their own sense of form, through hallucinatory acts of social embodiment and initial attempts at speech that emerge as Dada-esque sound poetry, finally reaching articulate self-reflection.
DREAM FACTORY distinguishes itself by avoiding tired tropes about machine consciousness or human replacement anxiety. Instead, the trio creates a unique narrative context that explores how artists and machines might improvise together—composing atmospheres, voices, and bodies that neither could make alone. The result is speculative and sensorial, at once fiction, documentary, expanded cinema, and prescient work of contemporary art.
Drawing from a rich lineage that spans Lynn Hershman Leeson's cyborgian explorations of artificial identity, and the dream-logic of Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Lynch, and American underground filmmakers like Carolee Schneemann and Stan Brakhage, the collective fuses poetic language and polyvalent montage techniques to conjure a previously unimagined art form, one that redefines how stories can be told in the age of AI.
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About the Artists
Mark Amerika has exhibited his art in many venues including the Whitney Biennial, the Denver Art Museum, ZKM, the Walker Art Center, and the American Museum of the Moving Image. His solo exhibitions have appeared all over the world including at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the University of Hawaii Art Galleries, the Marlborough Gallery in Barcelona and the Norwegian Embassy in Havana and the Estudio Figueroa-Vives art gallery.
Amerika has had five early and/or mid-career retrospectives including the first two Internet art retrospectives ever produced (Tokyo and London). In 2009-2010, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, featured Amerika’s comprehensive retrospective exhibition entitled UNREALTIME including his groundbreaking works of Internet art GRAMMATRON and FILMTEXT as well as his feature-length work of mobile cinema, Immobilité.
Will Luers is a digital artist, writer, and educator specializing in recombinant, computational, and AI cinema arts. His work and collaborations have garnered international recognition and been featured in festivals and conferences such as the Electronic Literature Organization, FILE(Brazil), and ISEA. "novelling," a generative work made in collaboration with poet Hazel Smith and sound artist Roger Dean, won the 2018 Robert Coover Award for Electronic Literature.
Luers holds an MFA in Film from Columbia University and has taught cinema history, theory and practice for over 20 years. He was awarded Best Screenplay at the 2005 Nantucket Film Festival, and in 2010, a fellowship at the Vectors-NEH Summer Institute for the development of his database video documentary, "The Father Divine Project."
Chad Mossholder is a BAFTA-nominated composer and sound artist. With a career spanning over two decades, his diverse portfolio encompasses experimental electronic music composition, audio/visual art installations, and the dynamic realm of video game music and sound design. His critically acclaimed music project “Twine” has performed all over the world and has released six full length albums as well as numerous mini-albums and EP’s on such labels as Schematic, Hefty Records, and Ghostly Records. Mossholder's sound designs also span a diverse range of high-profile game titles including DOOM, DOOM Eternal, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Star Wars Galaxies and DC Universe Online.