BODY COSMOS
Directed by Sam Carson, Félix Morreo Zisserman
Production Design by Lela Turner
Composition by William Palazzo

In 1895, the Lumière brothers captured workers leaving their factory on celluloid, promising an unfiltered truth through light. This captured light aimed to preserve history as it happened. In the 21st century, digital imaging transformed this process. Light was no longer simply captured but interpreted, mediated, and converted into data. The information age promised mastery over data but introduced the glitch: moments where this control falters, revealing the ghost in the machine. Generative imagery further complicates this. We can no longer pinpoint the glitch; it becomes a nebulous, incorporeal part of the image; the ghost is the machine.

Body Cosmos began as a live-action digital video, featuring a ‘body’ escaping an abandoned factory only to fall prey to the data-lens itself. The footage was then converted into thousands of still images, each replaced with AI-generated frames through a text-to-image process. The final video is an AI-reanimated version of the original body in motion. By stripping away layers of personhood, Body Cosmos reveals a body perceptible only through its motion, using AI’s uncanny quality to explore a ‘true body’—constantly reshaped and recreated rather than fixed in time.