Mode Collapse

A runaway chain reaction through temporal incoherence and semantic drift, Mode Collapse brings together selections of “Industrial Society and Its Future” also known as the Unabomber Manifesto, authored by Ted Kaczynski, that was originally published by the Washington Post in 1995. The 35,000-word manifesto warns about the perils of industrialization and functioned as a dire warning in the face of future artificial intelligence. Re-imagined here 30 years later, the excerpted manifesto is read by af_nicole.pt, a pre-trained text to voice ASMR model. The parallel lines are given as text-to-video prompts to the WAN2.1 model released by Alibaba for open-source, local use in ComfyUI. Additional layers are constructed with the mmaudio video-to-audio synthesis model released by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Sony. Workflows for this film are open source and available in .json format upon request.