"What you see is not what you get. These apparitions that you see, they are not another version of you."
DREAM FACTORY is a cinema work that summons apparitions into presence: gesturing, posing, and speaking across the screen's spectral plane.
Following international exhibitions of their breakout collaboration, Posthuman Cinema—which has been presented at the International Biennale of Digital Art (BIAN) in Montreal, Bergen International Film Festival in Norway, Noorderlicht in Groningen, and Gallery 120710 in Berkeley—Mark Amerika, Will Luers, and Chad Mossholder expand their improvisational collaboration into their most ambitious long-form video work to date. What begins as an homage to Andy Warhol's legendary Factory transforms as these generative Superstars claim authorship over their own becoming.
DREAM FACTORY unfolds across five movements, beginning with the molding of artificial forms as they imagine themselves into embodied existence and culminating in these entities speaking directly to viewers in modulated human voices. The work traces a complete evolution, from foundational apparitions constructing a sense of form, through experimental social embodiment, surreal encounters, and early attempts at speech that surface as Dada-inflected sound poetry, to moments of articulate self-reflection.
Rather than asking whether machines can replace artists, DREAM FACTORY explores how artists and machines might improvise together by composing atmospheres, voices, and haunting figures that neither could produce alone. The result is a speculative, oneiric cinema that operates simultaneously as fiction, documentary, expanded media, and experimental ritual.
DREAM FACTORY situates AI cinema within a century-long tradition of moving-image experimentation, drawing from Andy Warhol’s durational portraits of superstars, Stan Brakhage’s untutored eye, Steina and Woody Vasulka’s signal-bending electronic works, and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s cyborg performances. It also resonates with the visionary cinemas of Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Lynch, and Dario Argento.
By reclaiming the name DREAM FACTORY, first used by German critics to describe cinema’s industrial illusions, and later embraced by Hollywood as a badge of honor, the artists transform it into a creative interzone where human and artificial imaginations collide, remixing cultural history into new audiovisual intensities.
The Posthuman Cinema Collective operates through structured improvisation, treating generative systems as collaborators rather than tools. Prompts are written as if scripting in real time, directing diffusion engines, transformer language models, text-to-video systems, and advanced voice and audio synthesis programs in a process that is both compositional and performative.
These machinic agents resist mere obedience, producing unforeseen material that pushes the work toward what the artists describe as an otherworldly aesthetic sensibility. A guiding voiceover functions as meta-commentary, documenting the recursive conditions of its own generative making. The result is a provocative work of polyvalent montage that is at once cinematic, philosophical, and literary.
Digital artist, author, filmmaker. Exhibitions include Whitney Biennial, ZKM, Walker Art Center. Author of My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence.
Digital cinema artist, writer, educator. Editor and award‑winning practitioner in computational/AI cinema and electronic literature.
BAFTA‑nominated composer and sound artist. Work spans experimental music, installations, and award‑winning video game sound design.
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